The Fight For Voting Rights Won’t End

Asking what President Biden and House and Senate Democrats can possibly do now to protect voting rights when two Democratic senators refuse to join them in passing legislation supporting the fundamental principle of American democracy is the wrong question.

The real question is for all the rest of us, the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe every eligible voter has a Constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. The question is: What can all of us do now to overcome opposition to voting rights from two Democrats, all 50 Republican senators and nearly all 212 Republican House members?

When the current opposition to voting rights is clearly identified by the numbers, it’s obvious what American voters have to do. They have to elect more Democratic senators.

The reason two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, can block civil rights legislation supported by all 48 other Democratic senators is because the Senate is evenly divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans and Republicans no longer support voting rights.

Sustaining Democracy?

Democracy is not sustainable in a country where only one of its two major political parties supports voting rights. And it’s even worse than that. Last year 19 Republican state legislatures passed new laws specifically aimed at disenfranchising voters based on race or living in counties likely to vote Democratic. Some even allow Republican legislators to throw out the results of presidential elections in their states just like President Trump urged them to do after he was defeated.

“The goal of the former president and his allies is to disenfranchise anyone who votes against them, simple as that,” President Biden said in Atlanta. “The facts won’t matter; your vote won’t matter. They’ll just decide what they want and then do it. That’s the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.”