Republicans spit on memory of John Lewis, again
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Senate Republicans spit on the memory of civil rights hero John Lewis Wednesday afternoon when all but one of them blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act from proceeding to the floor for debate, 50-49. Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican willing to join Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer changed his vote to “nay” so that he can bring the bill back to the floor at some point.
Republicans didn’t even filibuster it as none of them bothered to spend any time talking on the floor about it. They just gave the finger to democracy, as everyone—including Sen. Joe Manchin, who keeps insisting that Republicans will work with him—knew they would.
The bill would have restored the federal government’s ability to prohibit and prevent voting discrimination, which was lost when the Supreme Court gutted much of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2013 with the Shelby County v. Holder decision, then finished the job this year in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. In Shelby, the Supreme Court struck down the requirement in the VRA that states and local jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to have any change to voting or elections law preapproved by the Justice Department.
The Court declared that the formula used by the Justice Department to determine which jurisdictions were covered in this “preclearance” system was unconstitutional. A wave of new voter suppression laws flowed from Republican states in response. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would overcome that Supreme Court ruling by imposing a national preclearance system in which any state with 15 voting right violations on record within the past 25 years, or states that had 10 violations if “at least one of which was committed by the State itself” would be covered.
Any local government that had three violations in that time period would also be covered. All 50 states, regardless of their history or lack thereof of racist voting laws, would have to submit to a degree of preclearance for laws that reduce “the proportion of the jurisdiction’s voting-age population” belonging to particular racial or language minority group by 3% percent or more; redistricting laws in areas with significant minority population growth; certain voter ID laws; and closing or reducing the hours of polling places.
The bill would also have restored and strengthened protections abolished by the court in Brnovich, allowing courts to block voting laws on their discriminatory effect rather than intent, a harder threshold to prove. The court made proving discrimination much harder for plaintiffs, and gave lawmakers and election officials enacting discriminatory rules expansive leeway in the supposed interest of combating voting fraud—even in the total absence of evidence of such fraud. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would prohibit courts from considering factors like whether a particular voting restriction “has a long pedigree or was in widespread use at some earlier date,” or whether the law is defended as an effort to fight “fraud.”
Once again, Republicans were able to stop the Senate from even debating the bill without lifting so much as their pinkies. Neither Manchin nor Sen. Kyrsten Sinema did a thing to question that. Worse, they spent part of the vote cozying up to Mitch McConnell.
This, Democrats say, is the end of their efforts to get Republicans to do the right thing on voting rights. “This is our fourth, and I think final, attempt to find partners across the aisle who will defend the right of every American to vote,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, told reporters. “We’ve given it every possible effort over now five months, four different strategies. It’s not going to happen, so we’re going to have to do it with 50 members. And we’re going to have to sit down and decide how we’re going to do it.”
That means ending the filibuster, which Manchin and Sinema are continuing to refuse to do. “We’ve got Lisa Murkowski, we just need nine more,” Manchin said, sounding like either the world’s stupidest or most duplicitous man. “We need other people to be talking to each other and find a pathway forward. It can’t just be one or two people talking to both sides.”
No wonder McConnell is so cozy with him.