August 28, 2021
Today, Americans across the country marched for voting rights.
They recognize that our right to have a say in our government is slipping out of our hands. At a rally in Washington, Martin Luther King III told the crowd, “Our country is backsliding to the unconscionable days of Jim Crow. And some of our senators are saying, ‘Well, we can’t overcome the filibuster,’.... I say to you today: Get rid of the filibuster. That is a monument to white supremacy we must tear down.”
Since 1986, Republicans have worked to limit access to the polls, recognizing that when more people vote, they lose. Those restrictions took off after 2013 when, in the Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required the Department of Justice to sign off on changes to voting in states with histories of racial discrimination.
That decision opened the way to voter restrictions, but voting laws have come especially fast and furious this year. Republicans have refused to accept that the election of Democrat Joe Biden was legitimate and, in Republican-dominated states, have worked to make sure Democrats do not have the power to elect another president in the future. Between January 1 and July 14 of this year, at least 18 states have enacted 30 laws restricting access to the vote.
Their plan is clearly to make sure those states stay Republican, no matter what the voters actually want.
This lack of competition destroys Democrats’ chances of winning elections, but it also pushes the Republican Party further and further to the right. With states sewn up for a Republican victory, potential Republican presidential candidates have to worry less about winning a general election than about winning the primaries.
Because primary voters are always the most energized and partisan voters, and because for the Republicans that currently means staunch Trump supporters, those vying to be Republican front runners are the Trump extremists: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, and even Florida’s Matt Gaetz and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently have been touring the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire attacking mask requirements and vaccine mandates, critical race theory and the infrastructure bills currently under discussion in Congress.
Vote-rigging in Republican-dominated states leads logically to a Republican extremist winning the White House in 2024.
Congress has before it two voting rights bills that would help to restore a level playing field between the two parties. One, the For the People Act, protects the right to vote, ends partisan gerrymandering, limits corporate money in elections, and requires new ethics rules for elected officials. The House passed the For the People Act in March.
On Tuesday, August 24, the House passed the second of the two voting rights bills, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021, also known as H.R. 4, which expands the system of preclearance that had been in the 1965 Voting Rights Act before 2013. Under the John Lewis bill, the Department of Justice has to sign off on voting changes not simply in states with a longstanding history of discrimination, but also in states anywhere in the country that have shown a pattern of violations of voting rights.
Both of these measures are stalled in the Senate, where Republicans, who insist that states, not the federal government, must have the final say in who gets to vote, have vowed to filibuster them. Unless the Democrats can agree to carve out an exception to the filibuster for voting rights, the measures will die.
And today, Americans across the country marched for voting rights.
Today is the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was on this day in 1963 that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Dr. King anchored the speeches for the day, though: before him spoke the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a young John Lewis. Just 23 years old, he had been one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.
Two years later, as Lewis and 600 marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, mounted police troopers charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured Lewis’s skull.
The attack in Selma created momentum for voting rights. Just after the attack, President Lyndon Baines Johnson called for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. It did. On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented.
Today is also the anniversary of the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single senator. On this date in 1957, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond began his filibuster to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1957, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was designed to protect the right of African Americans to vote, using the federal government to overrule the state laws that limited voter registration and kept Black voters from the polls.
On a day that harks back to both John Lewis’s fight for voting rights and Strom Thurmond’s fight against them, I wonder which man’s principles will shape our future.
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Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/elections-voting-laws-voting-rights-e88531ad09c368872a51eeb1cd833838
It did not surprise me to receive the Letter this Sunday morning. No stunning picture of the Maine coast, light shimming on the water and the dark sky streaked with orange and gold; instead, words on the screen told us about the people marching this weekend for voting rights.
"We are not going to stop": Thousands gathered on Saturday for the annual "March On for Voting Rights". 58 years ago Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech at the first March on Washington. 58 years ago and we're still marching because access to the vote is never guaranteed for Blacks and Browns in the United States of America. Eighteen states have already enacted 30 laws this year that will make it harder for Americans to vote.
Heather didn't trudge herself to bed at a decent hour on Saturday night because the alarm clock in her mind warned her that 'our right to have a say in our government is slipping out of our hands'. (Letter)
The truth of Biden's presidential win was just to hard to bare. It couldn't be true. The election was a rigged. There was fraud. Trump really won in a landslide.
A Cyber Ninja Audit in Maricopa, Arizona would provide the evidence for election fraud. The Ninjas have been auditing the returns since April 22th, 2021, It is now August 29, 2021. What's up Cyber Ninjas?
Take a quick break. This is really happening. In the midst the pandemic, which is now surging ,again; a dangerous hurricane, Ida, about to hit Louisiana; our country is getting wetter and drier as the temperatures soar -- Climate Change is changing faster than the scientists predicted. -- and to top that off, we have radically undemocratic Republicans working like demons to rob Americans of their voting rights.
'Two agencies that oversee Arizona elections went on the offensive Thursday to debunk and discredit the soon-to-be released results of the Senate's unconventional and partisan review of Maricopa County's 2020 general election.'
'Two reports released by Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, highlighted the erroneous and insecure nature of the audit conducted by Senate contractors. They also reiterated the ways that the county and state verified the election was sound.'
'The bipartisan effort to discredit the results from lead contractor Cyber Ninjas before they are released was not coordinated, Richer said. But both were seemingly aimed at the same purpose — getting ahead of misinformation or inaccuracies that may be in the Cyber Ninjas report.' (AZCentral)
All is not lost, but we have yet to get a national voting act bill passed. 'The House approved the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act on Tuesday in a party-line vote, kicking the legislation to the Senate — where it faces longer odds of passage. The bill is seen as having a better chance of moving forward than a more sweeping voting rights measure known as the For the People Act.'
'Either legislation could get to President Biden’s desk if all 50 Democrats agreed to make an exception to the filibuster, but Manchin and fellow centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are against any kind of filibuster reform'. (The Hill)
I say both pieces of legislation could and should get to the presidents desk for signing.
This is where we enter. In the next few weeks we will be contacting President Biden and our Senators because we are on the front lines to get these bills passed. We cannot permit our say in government slip out of our hands. We are the anti-filibuster Army.
A friend posted this on Face Book today. It's from RARE BAGS with John Farrell, August 26, 2021, at 3:14 AM. The author is the great thinker Arundhati Roy. You may remember her novel "The God of Small Things."
"What is this thing that has happened to us? It's a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus... It has mad the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to 'normality', trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."