Tag Archives: Voting Rights

The Best Argument Against the Filibuster: It’s Unconstitutional!

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There’s a rumor that Krysten Sinema (“Dem” – AZ) thinks her career — including being elected to the Senate — has been so impressive that her logical next step is to run for president. That’s why she doesn’t care that protecting the filibuster is killing the Democratic agenda and that, as a result, Democrats in Arizona hate her. She’s planning to run for president in 2024 under the banner of “bipartisanship”. It’s a ludicrous idea, but her big money donors are willing to fuel her fantasies. 

Filibuster reform may be dead for now but Thomas Geoghagen explains why the filibuster is  unconstitutional. From The New Republic: 

Over the course of many years and many think pieces, the case against the filibuster has been laid out. Typically, critics of the Jim Crow relic invoke various historical facts (some of which have apparently been lost on, or willfully ignored by, certain critical members of the Senate), as well as an array of practical and prudential bases. Onto the pile, however fruitlessly, let us add another: The filibuster is a plot against Vice President Kamala Harris—to take away her constitutional right to vote.

Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution makes it plain: Harris, as chair of the Senate, is given the responsibility to vote “when the Senate is equally divided.” In all the furor over the filibuster blocking voting rights legislation, keep in mind it is blocking Harris from this constitutional right, as well. The supermajority rule that ran counter to the Founders’ desires, now upheld by the filibuster’s status quo, is not just aiding in the disenfranchisement of voters by blocking meaningful voting rights legislation from passage—it’s also disenfranchising the woman sent to Washington to resolve the disputes of a divided Senate.

It would be fitting if Harris, given the chance to gavel the filibuster out of existence to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, reclaimed her rights at the same time. She can put that to the Senate on January 17 when any rules changes are being considered—by starting with a declaration that the filibuster is not just unfair or undemocratic but unconstitutional, as well.

The filibuster is not just a technical violation of Article I—though it is precisely that—it’s also a repudiation of its original design. That design created a bicameral legislature, with each house operating by majority rule, to replace the single legislative chamber that operated under the Articles of Confederation by supermajority or unanimous consent. By sneaking in a supermajority rule on the sly, as a procedural rule of debate, the Senate has essentially brought back a form of the obsolete Articles of Confederation. It shouldn’t really come as any surprise that the republic now faces a similar impetus toward disunion to the one it faced when the Articles were in place. The plot against Kamala Harris is not just a plot against the Constitution—it’s a force that threatens the existence of the United States itself.

It is without doubt a fact that the Framers wanted a deliberative legislative body. That’s why they divided the Congress into two houses—to provide a vital check and balance. Supermajority rule in the Senate upends the Framers’ intentions: It places too great a check on the House—without the House’s consent. More specifically, it inflicts an institutional injury on the House, as the “active principle of government” that the House is unable to redress. This is exactly what worried James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others who bitterly criticized supermajority rules.

Yes, as defenders of the filibuster point out, the Senate has a right to make rules as to its own proceedings, but trifling with majority rule crosses textual red lines. Beyond the aforementioned Vice President Voting Clause in Article 1, Section 3, there is also the “Presentment Clause” of Article I, Section 7, which says in two places—yes, twice—that any bill or resolution passed by the House and Senate, “shall, before it becomes law, be presented to the President,” and if sent back, then it must be “approved by two thirds of each House.” The Presentment Clause would make no sense if the Senate required more than a majority to send it to the president in the first place. Finally, there is the Enumeration of Super Majority Rules, the seven times in the text of the Constitution that specifically lay out where and when a supermajority is expressly required.

One might nevertheless ask, why not by majority rule permit Congress [to institute] rule by supermajority? Of course this is an academic question—for Congress, by vote of both Houses, has never adopted a supermajority rule. The filibuster is simply a rule of the Senate, which has the effect of limiting the ability of the Congress to act. But Congress itself has never approved it. Yes, there has long been a cloture rule for the so-called “talking” filibuster. In 1917, the Senate adopted such a rule, which then required a two-thirds vote—now reduced to three-fifths. And while this rule did have a disgraceful and pernicious effect in race-related matters, the talking filibuster of old only on rare occasions held up a majority vote, maybe once or twice a year or not at all. But in our time, the talking filibuster for which the rule was intended is gone; no one has to talk to block a bill. And what was a procedural rule to get to a vote faster is now a rule that stops a vote from happening at all.

No, Congress has not adopted and never would adopt such a rule. Why would the House consent? As it now exists, it lets the Senate place a much greater check on legislation passed by the House than the Framers ever intended. It’s bad enough that this upsets the balance of power between the Senate and House, but it also upends the balance of power between the federal government and the states. The Senate, representing the states, is blocking the House, representing the people.

For the sake of argument, let us assume the text of the Constitution is less explicit than it actually is. Allowing Rule 22, which bars a vote by the majority without even active debate, still violates two fundamental canons of constitutional interpretation. The first canon, or rule, is the expressio unius principle—listing the exceptions for supermajority implies the exclusion of all others. That principle is basic in constitutional interpretation. In the case of Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court barred the U.S. House from excluding Adam Clayton Powell as a member because of “unethical conduct.” That was not one of the bases listed in the Constitution, and the listing of those bases implied the exclusion of others.

Additionally, to allow the Senate to add a supermajority rule would violate a second canon, the so-called Federalism Canon—which calls for the balance between federal and state power to be left alone. The filibuster changes the relative balance of power between the Senate, representing the states, and the House, representing the people. It is no accident that in blocking voting rights legislation, it is being used to protect the states from being regulated.

Harris, as chair, could reach the same conclusions. Rather than just hope a Senate majority uses the “nuclear option” to rid us of the filibuster, she could press the button. For the reasons above, she could declare the supermajority for cloture to be in conflict with Article I.

She may fail in the attempt. A majority can overturn a ruling of the chair. It is not so easy even for some Democrats in the Senate to give up the filibuster. There are many, many other bills that the senators take up other than voting rights legislation. So individual senators are caught in a dilemma worthy of a class in game theory—though glad to remove it for A, they do not want to remove it for B, or maybe C, or maybe D, or maybe an unknown X that will arrive later in their six-year terms. So the filibuster remains in place forever—except now for the budget and for nominations to judgeships and political positions. In these two cases, the budget and nominations, there is no choice but to get rid of the filibuster or there would be institutional collapse of the courts and of the executive branch.

However, with the John Lewis Act and Freedom to Vote Act, we are speaking about the institutional collapse of democracy itself. Protecting the integrity of federal elections from state interference is necessary to the integrity of the federal government—it is an obligation that is set forth in the original Elections Clause, Article I, Section 4. It is the only clause, the only text, that says Congress can override any state regulation of a federal election. Ever since 1787, Article I, Section 4 has been in there, the original nuclear option, to protect the national government from institutional collapse. It is an outrage to use the filibuster to block even the power of the national government to save itself. Surely that must have at least the same priority as enacting a budget by majority rule.

Let the vice president show some muscle in defense of her country. Let the debate start on January 17 with a ruling from the chair that Rule 22 is in conflict with her own right to cast a vote when the Senate is evenly divided. Then let her dare the Senate to overrule her. To reclaim the right to vote in the blocked legislation, she should begin with reclaiming her own right to vote, as well.

By a quirk of history, the plot against America is now also a plot against a Black woman’s right to vote. Who says the vice president has nothing to do?

Manchin, Manchin, Manchin, Maybe, Maybe, Maybe

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Since all 50 Republican senators are opposed to even debating voting rights legislation, the only way for the current Senate to protect democracy is for all 50 Democrats to agree to change the filibuster. One “Democrat” who hasn’t agreed yet is the Maserati-driving, coal-loving senator from West Virginia. Greg Sargent of The Washington Post says there might still be a glimmer of hope regarding Sen. Manchin and voting rights:

By now, you’d be forgiven for concluding the chances of Sen. Joe Manchin III supporting a filibuster carve-out to pass democracy protections are somewhere between nonexistent and extremely nonexistent.

The West Virginia Democrat has spent many months chasing after Republican support for legislation protecting voting rights and democracy, and virtually none has materialized. Yet he continues to insist he won’t support any sort of filibuster reform, even to pass legislation he himself champions that would accomplish something he himself says is essential [it’s not clear he knows the meaning of “essential”].

But in an interesting twist, some Senate Democrats still haven’t given up on Manchin. Though the story all over Twitter is that Waiting For Manchin is utterly hopeless, they’re still trying to win him over.

I’m told Manchin and a dozen other Senate Democrats met with an expert on Senate rules and discussed various ways of carving out a filibuster exception or otherwise reforming it to allow passage of voting rights legislation. . . . 

The ideas included looking at how to change the rules specifically to pass voting rights protections by a simple majority threshold, a Senate Democratic source who shared details of the meeting told me. The source added: “Manchin is engaged.”

The expert whom Manchin and other Democrats met with is Martin Paone, who has three decades of experience in Senate staff positions, the source tells me. Paone will also attend Friday’s caucus meeting among Senate Democrats, where this will get further discussion.

These meetings are separate from another set of meetings going on among Senate Democrats that doesn’t involve Manchin.

Manchin supports a reasonably good package of democracy protections, including things such as automatic voting registration, various curbs on voter suppression and election subversion, limits on partisan gerrymandering, and baseline standards to facilitate voting by mail. Elections expert Richard L. Hasen has declared a package like this worth supporting.

The dynamics on Manchin and the filibuster are more complicated than it seems from the outside. According to a voting rights advocate who has been in discussions with Manchin and other Democratic senators, the basic contours of the situation are as follows.

First, Manchin remains reluctant to support anything seen as a “slippery slope” to ending the filibuster entirely. So it’s more likely he’d support reforms that stop short of a full carve-out of the filibuster to pass voting legislation. Such reforms could include requiring the minority to hold the floor to sustain a filibuster . . . 

The advocate says Manchin is more open to ideas [that] can legitimately be described as “restoring the filibuster” [to what it used to be, i.e. a way to delay a vote, not block it].

This would be a good argument. After all, a filibuster can now be executed simply via an emailed statement from a single senator. That’s obviously a ridiculous state of affairs that allows the minority to render the Senate dysfunctional for bad-faith purposes while escaping procedural difficulties in doing so, and even evading public accountability for it.

Still, . . .  pulling the trigger on broad reforms [that would increase] the burden on the minority is complicated. Manchin could decide a carve-out just on voting rights is simpler in the interim, the advocate says.

Here’s another nuance. A second source who has been informed about discussions between Manchin and other senators tells me Manchin seems open to arguments that cast filibuster reform as a response to partisan procedural abuses.

In this conception of the situation, that source says, the fact that the Senate can’t pass voting rights legislation “shows that the institution is fundamentally failing,” precisely because it “used to do so on a broad bipartisan basis.”

What’s more, this source says, this sort of filibuster reform wouldn’t be about “passing the left’s priorities,” but instead about “passing changes that are basic to the functioning of democracy.”

Manchin appears open to these arguments as a longtime advocate for bipartisanship in the Senate, the source says, because here it’s obvious the filibuster is being used to further partisan efforts to close down pro-democracy reforms that used to be a bipartisan no-brainer.

And of course, this really is the essence of the matter. Manchin really has spent months in a good-faith effort to win over GOP support for democracy protections that he really does believe are essential to making the system function better.

The only [Republican] senator who has appeared marginally interested in participating is Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The fact that virtually the entire GOP is uninterested — while GOP state legislatures are passing restrictions on voting everywhere by simple majority — should have weight for Manchin.

Because after all, if democracy reform must be bipartisan, as Manchin says — yet virtually no Republicans will participate, no matter how earnestly Manchin seeks their support — then sticking to that notion is tantamount to allowing Republicans to single-handedly remove democracy reform from the agenda entirely, on a purely partisan basis.

That can’t be acceptable, by Manchin’s own lights.

To be clear, there are still reasons for extreme skepticism that Manchin will ever get to yes. But if he somehow does, these routes might be the way he gets there.

The Disappointing State of Play in the Senate

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The Brookings think tank has a page that explains the US Senate’s filibuster. This is a key section:

“Senators have two options when they seek to vote on a measure or motion. Most often, the majority leader (or another senator) seeks “unanimous consent,” asking if any of the 100 senators objects to ending debate and moving to a vote. If no objection is heard, the Senate proceeds to a vote. If the majority leader can’t secure the consent of all 100 senators, the leader (or another senator) typically files a cloture motion, which then requires 60 votes to adopt. If fewer than 60 senators—a supermajority of the chamber—support cloture, that’s when we often say that a measure has been filibustered” [meaning the measure won’t be debated, voted on or adopted].

“While much of the Senate’s business now requires the filing of cloture motions, there are some important exceptions. One involves nominations to executive branch positions and federal judgeships on which, thanks to two procedural changes adopted in 2013 and 2017, only a simple majority is required to end debate. A second includes certain types of legislation for which Congress has previously written into law special procedures that limit the amount time for debate. Because there is a specified amount of time for debate in these cases, there is no need to use cloture to cut off debate. Perhaps the best known and most consequential example of these are special budget rules, known as the budget reconciliation process, that allow a simple majority to adopt certain bills addressing entitlement spending and revenue provisions, thereby prohibiting a filibuster.”

Unquote. The upshot is that senators cannot filibuster the two things Republicans most care about, appointing judges and cutting taxes (odd how that worked out). 

To avoid a Republican filibuster, the Democrats are trying to use the budget reconciliation process to pass Biden’s very important Build Back Better act by a simple majority (meaning 50 Democratic “yes” votes, followed by Vice President Harris voting “yes” to break the 50-50 tie). But one Democratic senator still won’t provide the 50th vote the Democrats need. 

They also want to pass voting rights legislation to protect what’s left of American democracy. They can’t use the budget reconciliation process for voting rights, so they need a different way to get around a Republican filibuster. The only way to do that is for the 50 Democrats (and VP Harris) to change Senate rules to make voting rights legislation an exception to the filibuster (in the same way judges and tax cuts are exceptions). But one or two Democratic senators still won’t provide the 49th and 50th vote the Democrats need. 

From today’s Crooked Media “What a Day” newsletter:

With Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) blocking passage of the Build Back Better Act, Senate Democrats have gamely pivoted to the voting-rights legislation also blocked by Manchin and Sinema. Get in, loser, we’re going nowhere in a different direction! 

  • Final negotiations on the reconciliation package appear to have ground to a halt, as Manchin’s objections to temporary programs (including the temporary child-tax-credit extension) and overall price tag thwart Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s plan to get it passed by Christmas. The final monthly payment authorized under the current expanded child tax credit went out on Wednesday; Congress would need to extend the program by December 28 to keep the payments on track in January. 
  • Anxious to get something done, some Senate Democrats have announced a new push to pass their elections bill, despite still needing unanimous agreement on changing filibuster rules to do so. Schumer said on Thursday that he hopes to get voting legislation passed “in time for the 2022 elections,” tacitly acknowledging that there’s no way a bill makes it to President Biden’s desk before the end of the year. 
  • On the one hand, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) made a terrific point on the Senate floor this week, after lawmakers approved a filibuster [exception] to raise the debt ceiling: “I believe that it is misplaced to change the Senate rules only for the benefit of the economy when the warning lights on our democracy are flashing at the same time. I happen to believe that our democracy is at least as important as the economy.” Hard to fault that logic!

On the other hand, there’s no indication that Manchin and Sinema have come around to the rule changes necessary to pass the bills they say they support. 

  • Manchin indicated on Tuesday that he’s still not open to reforming the filibuster to pass voting-rights legislation unless there are Republican votes to do so, to the gleeful cackles of Republicans everywhere. A Sinema spokesperson ruined everyone’s holidays by announcing Wednesday that she “continues to support the Senate’s 60-vote threshold,” though Democrats are discussing narrow filibuster reforms and not outright abolition, so it’s worth noting that Sinema’s office also called for “the Senate to publicly debate its rules, including the filibuster, so senators and all Americans can hear and fully consider such ideas, concerns, and consequences.” It’s not, like, a lot of hope, but at this point we’ll settle for vaguely hope-scented. 
  • Schumer may not have an obvious plan to get voting bills passed before the midterms, but he’s right to want to. Democrats may have owned themselves out of their House majority by refusing to gerrymander as aggressively as Republicans in the handful of states where they had the chance, in the absence of redistricting reforms. The decision of just five blue states—California, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington—to switch over to nonpartisan redistricting commissions will cost House Democrats 10-15 seats, according to trusted redistricting nerd Dave Wasserman. It’s entirely possible that Republicans will gain control with a smaller margin than that.

To quote Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) this morning, “a 50-50 Senate sucks and we can’t get things done.” Rather than unconvincingly pretending otherwise until it’s time for another vacation, Senate Democrats might as well be clear about the fact that two of their members are abetting the GOP assault on democracy, and at some point make them go on the record about it.

“One Vice President Away From a Coup”

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More journalists and Democratic politicians are focusing on the Republican attack on democracy, i.e. their efforts to insure that they win future elections, no matter how many votes they get. CNN quoted Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington:

We have to be Paul Revere every chance we get to let people know what is at risk and why it is at risk. . . . I don’t think you can be overly concerned about this. The American psyche has not recognized we were one vice president away from a coup.

The New York Times published an article about it on Saturday and another today:

From the second article:

American politics today is not really normal. It may instead be in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time.

An anti-democratic movement, inspired by D____ T____ but much larger than him, is making significant progress . . . . In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election.

The movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out T____’s lies.

The pushback within the Republican Party has been so weak that about 60 percent of Republican adults now tell pollsters that they believe the 2020 election was stolen — a view that’s simply wrong.

Most Democratic officials, for their part, have been focused on issues other than election security, like Covid-19 and the economy. It’s true that congressional Democrats have tried to pass a new voting rights bill, only to be stymied by Republican opposition and the filibuster. But these Democratic efforts have been sprawling and unfocused. They have included proposals — on voter-ID rules and mail-in ballots, for example — that are almost certainly less important than a federal law to block the overturning of elections, as The Times’s Nate Cohn has explained.

All of which has created a remarkable possibility: In the 2024 presidential election, Republican officials in at least one state may overturn a legitimate election result, citing fraud that does not exist, and award the state’s electoral votes to the Republican nominee. T____ tried to use this tactic in 2020, but local officials rebuffed him.

Since then, his supporters have launched a campaign — with the Orwellian name “Stop the Steal” — to ensure success next time. Steve Bannon has played a central role, using his podcast to encourage T____ supporters to take over positions in election administration, ProPublica has explained. . . . 

The main battlegrounds are swing states where Republicans control the state legislature, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Republicans control these legislatures because of both gerrymandered districts and Democratic weakness outside of major metro areas . . . The Constitution lets state legislatures set the rules for choosing presidential electors.

“None of this is happening behind closed doors,” Jamelle Bouie, a Times columnist, recently wrote. “We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.”

Here is an overview of recent developments:

Arizona. Republican legislators have passed a law taking away authority over election lawsuits from the secretary of state, who’s now a Democrat, and giving it to the attorney general, a Republican. Legislators are debating another bill that would allow them to revoke election certification “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration.”

Georgia. Last year, Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, helped stop T____’s attempts to reverse the result. State legislators in Georgia have since weakened his powers, and a T____-backed candidate is running to replace Raffensperger next year. Republicans have also passed a law that gives a commission they control the power to remove local election officials.

Michigan. Kristina Karamo, a T____-endorsed candidate who has repeated the lie that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, is running for secretary of state, the office that oversees elections. (Republican candidates are running on similar messages in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and elsewhere, according to ABC News.)

Pennsylvania. Republicans are trying to amend the state’s Constitution to make the secretary of state an elected position, rather than one that the governor appoints. Pennsylvania is also one of the states where T____ allies — like Stephen Lindemuth, who attended the Jan. 6 rally that turned into an attack on Congress — have won local races to oversee elections.

Wisconsin. Senator Ron Johnson is urging the Republican-controlled Legislature to take full control of federal elections. Doing so could remove the governor, currently a Democrat, from the process, and weaken the bipartisan state elections commission.

The new anti-democratic movement may still fail. This year, for example, Republican legislators in seven states proposed bills that would have given partisan officials a direct ability to change election results. None of the bills passed.

Arguably the most important figures on this issue are Republican officials and voters who believe in democracy and are uncomfortable with using raw political power to overturn an election result. . . . 

Unquote.

Meanwhile, Sen. Manchin of West Virginia, who claims to be a Democrat, is meeting tomorrow with a group of Democratic senators trying to reform the filibuster in order to protect voting rights:

Voting-rights advocates want to see if Manchin would be open to a “carve-out” to the Senate’s filibuster rule for voting rights legislation. The idea gained more urgency for voting rights advocates after the chamber approved a “one-time exception” to its rules to approve a debt-limit increase by a simple majority vote.

Midnight Is Approaching: We Can Have Either the Filibuster or Democracy

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Last month, Republican senators refused to allow a vote on the Freedom To Vote Act. Because of the Senate’s filibuster rule, the fifty Democratic senators needed ten of their Republican colleagues to join them in allowing the bill to come up for a vote. But not one Republican voted with the Democrats (the Democratic majority leader changed his vote to No so the bill can be given another chance). Here’s why Republicans oppose the bill. The Freedom To Vote Act would:

  • Expand voter registration (e.g., automatic and same-day registration) and voting access (e.g., vote-by-mail and early voting) and limit removing voters from voter rolls.
  • Establish Election Day as a federal holiday.
  • Allow ex-felons to vote. 
  • Make it illegal to interfere with another person’s ability to register and vote.
  • Require states to follow new rules for post-election audits and congressional redistricting.
  • Expand the prohibition on campaign spending by foreign nationals and require additional disclosure of campaign-related fundraising and spending.

No wonder every single Republican senator refused to allow the bill to be considered. They’re opposed to the idea of majority rule.

In support of the bill’s passage, however, more than 150 academics, experts in subjects like political science, history and public policy, have released this statement:

We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy writing in support of the Freedom to Vote Act, the most important piece of legislation to defend and strengthen American democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This bill would protect our elections from interference, partisan gerrymandering, dark money, and voter suppression. We urge all members of Congress to pass the bill, if necessary by suspending the Senate filibuster rule and using a simple majority vote.

This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy. It is a moment of great peril and risk.

Though disputes over the legitimacy of America’s elections have been growing for two decades, they have taken a catastrophic turn since the 2020 election. The “Big Lie” of a stolen election is now widely accepted among Republican voters, and support for it has become a litmus test for Republicans running for public office. Republican state legislatures in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and across the country have enacted partisan laws intended to make it harder for Democrats to win elections. Most alarmingly, these laws have forged legal pathways for partisan politicians to overturn state election results if they are dissatisfied with the outcome.

The partisan politicization of what has long been trustworthy, non-partisan administration of elections represents a clear and present threat to the future of electoral democracy in the United States. The history of other crisis-ridden democracies tells us this threat cannot be wished away. It must be promptly and forthrightly confronted. Failure to pass the Freedom to Vote Act would heighten post-election disputes, weaken government legitimacy, and damage America’s international reputation as a beacon of democracy in the world.

Each branch of government has a role to play in protecting free and fair elections, but Congress’s responsibility looms largest. After the Civil War, when the path of American democracy was highly uncertain, Congress built the foundations of our modern democracy by passing two constitutional amendments and five pieces of legislation to protect the right of African Americans to vote. All were passed on party-line votes. But in 1890, the Senate failed to break a filibuster on a sixth piece of legislation: the Federal Elections Bill (also known as the Lodge Bill), which would have pushed back against voting rights violations in the South.

The upshot of that critical vote was that southern states, in the absence of any federal supervision, were allowed to pursue the wholesale disenfranchisement of African Americans for the next 75 years. By a tiny margin in one branch of Congress, American democracy took a giant leap backwards.

Protecting future elections from subversion, providing equal opportunities for all citizens to participate, drawing fair district boundaries, strengthening transparency over money in politics, and facilitating impartial electoral administration should not be partisan matters. Unfortunately, however, across state legislatures, Republicans have challenged the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election and altered election rules on party-line votes, with a clear intent to entrench minority rule.

If Congress fails to pass the Freedom to Vote Act, American democracy will be at critical risk. Not only could this failure undermine the minimum condition for electoral democracy—free and fair elections—but it would in turn likely result in an extended period of minority rule, which a majority of the country would reject as undemocratic and illegitimate. This would have grave consequences not only for our democracy, but for political order, economic prosperity, and the national security of the United States as well.

Defenders of democracy in America still have a slim window of opportunity to act. But time is ticking away, and midnight is approaching. To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form—in which a minority can block popular legislation without even having to hold the floor—would be a short-sighted mistake of historic proportions. The remarkable history of the American system of government is replete with critical, generational moments in which liberal democracy itself was under threat, and Congress asserted its central leadership role in proving that a system of free and fair elections can work.

We urge the Senate to suspend the filibuster rule for this measure and pass the Freedom to Vote Act. This would uphold the Senate’s noblest tradition of preserving and strengthening American democracy.

Unquote.

At least two Democratic senators, Sinema of Arizona and Manchin of West Virginia, have opposed reforming the filibuster in order to protect voting rights. Tom Tomorrow of This Modern World nicely captures the “logic” of their position:

TMW2021-11-24color

If you’d like to share your views on this matter (in a nice way) with Senator Sinema, you can contact her even if you don’t live in Arizona. Likewise, you can contact Senator Manchin even if you don’t live in West Virginia. Maybe they care enough about democracy to see reason.