The Battle For The Freedom To Vote Act Moves Forward
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | October 21, 2021
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans used a filibuster to block consideration of Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) compromise voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote Act.
Every Republican Senator voted to deny the Senate even the ability to debate the Manchin compromise bill on the Senate floor.
This battle, however, is by no means over. The fight now moves forward to its showdown phase.
Despite Senator Manchin’s serious efforts to negotiate Republican support for the compromise legislation he devised, Senate Republicans have now blocked voting rights legislation three times from being debated, let alone voted on, in the Senate.
It now falls to the 50 Democratic and Independent Senators who support voting rights legislation to devise a way to bypass the filibuster rules and pass the Act by a majority vote. Without such action, the destructive, anti-democratic laws being enacted by a number of states this year will take our democracy to the brink and beyond.
The Freedom to Vote Act would protect the sacred right to vote for all eligible Americans by overriding the unprecedented wave of state voter suppression laws that have been enacted this year around the country. It would also counter the state laws enacted this year to give highly partisan election officials the power to rig the outcome of federal elections in their states.
Changes to the filibuster rules have been routinely made over the years to allow measures to pass the Senate by majority vote. We are at one of those moments now with the right of every eligible American to vote and the integrity of our elections at stake.
It is clear that only by devising a bypass of the filibuster rules for this legislation can the Senate pass the Freedom to Vote Act.
Senator Manchin, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), a cosponsor of the predecessor voting rights legislation in this Congress, have been the two Democratic holdouts, to date, on finding a way to bypass the filibuster rules and pass the legislation by majority vote.
However, as Senator Manchin has said, “inaction is not an option” when it comes to passing voting rights legislation.
In the coming weeks, Senators Manchin and Sinema will face a decision of historic consequence. They should choose to be on the right side of history by supporting the passing of the Freedom to Vote Act by a majority vote in the Senate.
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.
