Reprinted from www.yesmagazine.org by CHRIS WINTERS
Voting rights reform has died an ignoble death in Congress. The way forward isn't clear or inspiring, but at least we still have on
This is the way democracy ends: with a whimper.
The day after President Biden's fiery Jan. 12 speech in favor of eliminating or reforming the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema let it be known that they were a big "no" vote on that.
Without their votes, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act are dead in the water, because no Republican is going to support expanding the franchise. On Jan. 19, Sen. Chuck Schumer forced a vote on amending the filibuster, but it was purely performative. No reasonable observer expected any other outcome.
And that means the Democrats' already uphill fight toward the November midterm elections just got a lot steeper.
To be honest, this ignoble outcome has been growing in likelihood since Biden took office one year ago. There was a concerted early push by Democrats to get laws passed to counteract the dozens of new state laws that are placing new restrictions on voting rights.
But Biden was missing from the fight. His priority was his Build Back Better agenda, which, no surprise, was also left to die after Manchin and Sinema refused to support it. (But they waited until after the bipartisan infrastructure bill was passed-with most climate change provisions stripped out of it-to say so, despite a previous agreement with progressives to bundle the two together.)
The key aspect that makes democracies work is the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another.
So here we are, in January 2022, staring down the next 10 months until the midterm election, during which time we can expect state-level Republicans to redouble their efforts to hinder voting rights. Meanwhile, newly drawn electoral maps will be put in place (with predictable lawsuits to come against those that are too gerrymandered to the benefit of Republicans and White voters), and Democrats will once again be looking for reasons to convince voters to support them.
There is a chance that the Republican plan to secure an electoral victory before the voting even starts will fail-that a groundswell of voters in numbers too big to manipulate will prevail. But that's the bare minimum that's needed if we dare to maintain hope that Congress will eventually enact legislation that protects or strengthens voting rights. And it will have to continue to happen every two years until the composition of Congress better reflects a nation that is trying to keep its democracy going.
But the odds are even greater that the GOP will take over one or both chambers of Congress, or, barring that, that the Democrats will barely hold on, continuing the body's deadlock for another two years.
And that's where the real risks to democracy lie: in the gradual whittling away at our democratic republic's ability to govern, giving even fewer reasons for a burned-out nation to muster the energy to care about its future.
Our two political parties can now best be described not just as moderate-liberal versus conservative, but as pro-democracy (with a few holdouts) versus authoritarian. That's not a state that can persist in a healthy democracy, because authoritarianism is absolute: Its only end points are complete power or complete destruction (or one followed by the other). Any democratic party whose primary goal is to keep the other party out of power is always going to be one election away from obliteration and risks becoming reactionary. That's precisely what's happened to the Republicans under Trump, with sitting members of Congress by turns denying and excusing the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The Republican Party is no longer conservative; by rejecting the legitimacy of elections unless they win, the party undercuts the rickety legs holding us all up. And the Trumpist party base has increasingly come to believe that violence is an acceptable tool to achieve political power.
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