Nearly 9 Months And Still No Senate Action On Voting Rights. Here’s Why.
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | November 18, 2021
On March 3, the House of Representatives passed the For the People Act, landmark legislation to establish fair voting rules for federal elections and to stop voter suppression efforts in the states.
Now, some nine months later, the Senate has failed to act on – or even consider – any voting rights legislation.
This includes the House-passed bill; the revised Freedom to Vote Act, engineered by Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), that is the Senate version of the House bill; and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, passed by the House in August.
Meanwhile, an unprecedented wave of voter suppression laws has been enacted this year by Republican-controlled state legislatures that will deny millions of Americans the ability to exercise their right to vote.
These laws are a frontal attack on our democracy and represent an effort to rig and hijack future federal elections, beginning with the 2022 congressional elections. The laws are aimed particularly at eliminating the votes of Black, brown, other minority, and disabled Americans.
The two voting rights bills currently pending in the Senate and supported by 50 Democratic and Independent Senators would override the state voter suppression laws. They would have the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris and pass by a majority vote if they were not subject to the supermajority requirement to end a filibuster.
There are three key reasons why these bills have not been considered in the Senate.
First and foremost, Senate Republicans as a bloc have filibustered the bills. Senate Republicans are sacrificing the heart and soul of our democracy – the right of citizens to choose their representatives – to their partisan zeal for power. History will judge these Senators as un-American and anti-democratic.
Second, given these circumstances, presidential leadership is necessary to rally the country and, as of yet, President Biden has failed to provide it. The President has not been willing to treat protecting our democracy as a top priority.
What President Biden has treated as his top priorities certainly are of great importance for the country. But, the President’s failure to recognize that our democracy is at stake in this battle could turn out to be a fatal flaw for his presidency and the country if the voting rights bills are not enacted.
Third, two Democratic Senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have been unwilling, to date, to support a change in the filibuster rules that would allow the voting rights legislation to pass by majority vote.
This makes no sense, as the Senate filibuster rules have never been sacrosanct. In fact, changes to the filibuster rules have been routine. There have been 161 exceptions to the supermajority requirement of the filibuster rules that were included in measures passed between 1969 and 2014, according to a study by Brookings.
Surely, enacting the historic civil rights legislation represented by the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is more important than blocking a 162nd change in the filibuster rules.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter here. Or, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
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