President Biden Must Use His Bully Pulpit On Voting Rights — Now
WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | DECEMBER 16, 2021
Yesterday, President Joe Biden said, “There’s nothing domestically more important than voting rights.”
This is an important statement by President Biden, but it belies Biden’s damaging failure over the past 11 months to treat the enactment of voting rights legislation as a top priority for his Administration.
Nevertheless, with two essential bills to preserve voting rights pending in the Senate – the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act – President Biden and the White House still can and must now move aggressively to help pass these bills.
“Precisely because the dangers to democracy often don’t become obvious to everyone until it’s too late, Biden needs to make raising the alarm his priority,” Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. recently wrote.
To put these “dangers to democracy” in perspective, let’s take stock of what the autocratic former President Trump, his acolytes, and Republican officeholders have done during this past year to attack, undermine, and severely threaten the integrity of our elections, the key to our democracy.
Trump has continued his incessant demagogic attacks on the 2020 presidential election claiming without a shred of evidence that the election was stolen from him.
Based on Trump’s blatant lies, there was an insurrectionist attack on the Capitol on January 6 by Trump followers in an attempt to stop Congress from formally declaring Joe Biden President.
This was part of a concerted effort by Trump, his Administration officials, and congressional Republicans to steal the election from President Biden with zero basis in fact or law.
During 2021, Republican-controlled state legislatures throughout the country have enacted unprecedented voter suppression laws to make it much harder to vote, particularly for minority and disabled voters, and, generally, for Democratic voters.
Republican-controlled state legislatures have also enacted unprecedented laws to subvert the nonpartisan administration of elections as a means to empower partisan election officials to rig the outcome of elections in favor of Republican candidates.
Republican Senators have used filibusters to block Congress from overriding these state laws.
In addition, Trump followers have been harassing and threatening state and local election officials and workers with the intent to undermine the fairness of future elections.
In preparation for the 2024 presidential election, Republicans also have been building on Trump’s unsuccessful efforts in 2020 to get state legislatures to substitute their own presidential electors for the electors chosen by the voters.
All of this and more represents an effort by Trump and Republican officeholders to replace the elections held in 2020 – elections with a record turnout and no evidence of any meaningful fraud – with future elections that will be marked with low turnout and that will be easily rigged by partisan election officials to elect Republican candidates who were not chosen by the voters.
President Biden must use his bully pulpit forcefully and aggressively to warn the country of the grave dangers facing our democracy and of the urgent need to enact voting rights bills – now.
The Senate must act now on voting rights legislation.
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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.
