Voting Wrongs

Voting-rights activists vow to continue their fight or the various bills in Congress that would nullify voter restrictions in the states, but they are pitching in a game with no hitters.  The Senate voted on a rule change to allow the bills to go through, the vote failed, and that was the end of it.  The topic likely will not come up in the Senate for the rest of 2022 and though a Democratic Senate may revisit the issue in 2023, the House will likely be Republican.  And, of course, any bill passed by the House in this Congress has to be voted on all over again in the next Congress that opens in . . . 2023.

The bright side? Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema turned out to be the only Democratic U.S. Senators to vote against the filibuster rule change to allow the voting-rights legislation to move to a vote.  The rest of the Democratic Senate caucus is otherwise united in the need to preserve voting rights, so this should bolster the Democratic progressive base somewhat going into the midterms.

Without the guarantee of passing any of President Biden's social legislation in 2022, Senate Democrats are planning to schedule votes on the legislation to force their Republican counterparts to go on record as proposing popular program proposals such as Medicare coverage expansion and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices.  The Democrats are hoping that Republicans will be forced to explain their "no votes in the misterm campaign.  There's just one problem with this strategy, and it's a big one: The Republicans are very good at explaining away their opposition to policies the majority of people support.  Especially when those who support them the most are the ones most likely to be discouraged from voting, thanks to all of these odious state voting laws.

The Democrats had best start voting on legislation soon, if exposing the Republicans as the real obstructionists after so much Democratic in-fighting over process is their only hope, because it looks less likely that they'll be able to propose anything in the 118th Congress that takes over in January 2023 - because of one or both houses under Republican control . . . though, thanks to election cheating, false-flag operations, and conspiracy theorists, the 119th Congress looks to be successful in passing Republican legislation under a Republican President . . . thanks to an emergency measure by the new administration that leaves the GOP with every seat in the House and the Senate. 😮

Voting Rights Blues

I loved President Biden's speech urging action to stop the Republicans from chipping away at voting rights.  The only problem was that he can't do anything about it.  Listening to his speech was like looking at a Maserati and knowing you'll never get to drive it.

Pressure on Democratic West Virginia senator Joe Manchin to allow the filibuster to be overruled on at least voting-rights legislation continues, as Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) is hoping for, but it's making as much progress as the COVID vaccination rate in this country.  That is, progress so incremental it hardly matters.  The only way Texas Democrats can keep the restricting voting rights bill in that state from passing is if they stay in Washington D.C. for another year.  And with COVID travel restrictions and lockdowns likely due to be imposed any day now, along with some of these Texas Democrats having come down with COVID despite being vaccinated, they just might be able to do that!

Meanwhile, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been holding her committee's hearings in Georgia to shed light on that state's new voting restrictions.  Hardly surprisingly, Republican members of the committee, including former and future Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have been boycotting the hearings.  They just don't want to . . . hear it.

As always, if Democrats have any hope of maintaining control of Congress in the 2022 midterms, they'll have to work with what they have and educate their base on navigating all of these new voting restrictions, which President Biden thinks is doable - though he may end up being in a minority of one on that.  It would be ironic if, in the 2024 congressional elections, Senator Manchin loses his seat in West Virginia due to new voting restrictions in his state.   

Voter Justice

I hope the announcement this past week from U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (below) means we've reached the nadir of the assault on voting rights.

Garland announced that the Justice Department will step up enforcement on voting rights in the states by scrutinizing voting laws that aim to restrict certain constituencies and challenge anything that the Justice Department finds unconstitutional and/or a threat to attempting to deny the right to vote to any eligible citizen.

"We know that expanding the ability of all eligible citizens to vote is a central pillar," Garland told the press. "That means ensuring that all eligible voters can cast a vote; that all lawful votes are counted; and that every voter has access to accurate information."

This comes as local election officials throughout the country are being harassed and intimidated by Trump supporters, and some of these local election officials have been driven into resigning from office.  Garland hopes to stem, if not stop completely, the tide of angry Trump supporters who are working in myriad of ways to rig the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential lection to ensure that the Republicans win back power in Washington with less than zero chance that Democrats ever regain it thereafter. Then we become a nominal democracy in which a white minority government controls a multiracial society like apartheid-era South Africa.  That would be the best-case scenario.  The worst-case scenario is that another pandemic or another attack on the Capitol leads to an authorization of board powers for the President - not necessarily Donald Trump but possibly Ron DeSantis or some other Trump lackey - that allow a declaration of martial law, the suspension of the Bill of Rights, the outlawing of opposition parties, and the suspension of passports, thus criminalizing emigration as well as immigration for those who wish to escape.  

And then after that, the quarter-millennial, or semiquincentennial, celebration of American independence in 2026 will ring hollow and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will recall Berlin in 1936.  

Garland is off to a goo start, and the Justice Department has a good deal of power to go after voter-suppression efforts, but it can only do so much. It could do a lot more with either voting-rights bill in Congress passed by Congress and signed by President Biden, but Republican opposition to both bills in the Senate means that Garland, like voters in states where casting a ballot will become as difficult as walking a tightrope between two skyscrapers, will have to work with what he has and figure out how to get around the obstructions. 

It's either that or we celebrate America's 250th birthday with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Bipartisanship?

It seems that the war against voting is over, and voting lost . . . after Joe Manchin dropped the big one.

Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has enormous power - something that might not have happened if North Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham hadn't been caught sexting and the party had a 51-49 majority in the Senate - ruled out voting for the voting rights bill the House passed, called the For the People Act.  He argues that the bill politicizes voting just like the Republicans have been doing so in the states.  Also, he's not going to support ending the filibuster in the Senate.

So that's it, right?  Joe Biden is not only going to be a one-term President, he's going to be a half-term President once the Republicans take back Congress in 2022?

Time out, people.  Manchin never said he's against bills that protect voting rights.  He's just against this one.  I don't profess to be an expert on voting rights legislation, but I understand that the arguments against it are that it does little to end gerrymandering and even less to stop partisan officials from hijacking the vote count and throwing out results they don't like.  Rather, Manchin's hoping to gain support for the less comprehensive but still effective John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act and allow the federal government to oversee changes in state voting laws.  He and his fellow senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, are working to get that passed.  (I'm not going any deeper into the intricacies of either bill, because that's above my pay grade.)

As for eliminating the filibuster, Manchin may be right about keeping it, because without the filibuster, a Republican majority could bass bad legislation in the Senate quite simply under a Republican President ready, willing and able to sign it.  And if the Republicans deny President Biden a comprehensive infrastructure bill or two-time him by agreeing to a deal on infrastructure and then stopping it, then and only then would Manchin be likely to enable it to pass through reconciliation.  But he'd still keep the filibuster.   

As for how President Biden's agenda moves forward, we'll see what happens.  But it looks like Manchin's fingerprints will be all over it.     

As for the President's negotiations with Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) on the infrastructure bill, well, I think he's negotiating with the wrong West Virginia senator. 

Block the Vote - 2021 Edition, Part Two

The New York Times had a report recently about how the Democrats have two chances to defeat Republican voter suppression laws in the states through the courts and through legislation, and those two chances are slim and fat.  Boiling it all down, the report explained how Democrats are outvoted in the state legislatures and cannot stop the voter-suppression juggernaut.  But fighting voter suppression through lawsuits is even more of a lost cause, as the suits take forever to go through the system and may not be ruled upon until December 2022 at the earliest - one month too late to give the Democrats a fighting chance in the midterms. And even the very idea that they could actually win any of these suits is in doubt, as the new voter-restriction laws - ostensibly designed to combat voter fraud - is dubious, because the laws have been so carefully worded that an accusation that they're designed to suppress Democratic constituencies could be seen as a smack-talking partisan exercise . . . and a charge that's very hard to prove. 

Democratic efforts to move a voting rights bill - passed by the U.S. House - out of the U.S. Senate Rules Committee are stuck in neutral thanks to Republican opposition to it and one Democrat - Joe Manchin West Virginia, of course - who has concerns about how the law would affect rural states like his own.  (Once again, time to bash Democrats Sara Gideon in Maine and Cal Cunningham in North Carolina for losing the least losable U.S. Senate elections of 2020 and making Manchin's position in the catbird seat possible!)  Democrats find themselves negotiating with Manchin to get him to back the bill by making changes to please him.  In that case, it goes back to the House, where Madame DeFarge - also known as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - and buddies of hers such as potty-mouthed Rashida Tlaib will object to the changes made in the Senate.  And so on and so on.

Baring a miracle, it looks like Republicans will easily keep these changes in state voting laws in place to enable them to win back Congress in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024 - and we'll have a situation in which Democrats become a permanent minority even as Republicans are sustained by a minority of the country because the electorate will be too narrow and too exclusionary.  Oh, Democrats might get a bone thrown at them every now and then in the form of bipartisan legislation in the form of an earned-income tax credit and a Cesar Chavez monument on the National Mall in Washington, but things like universal health care, bullet trains for Amtrak - yeah, they won't get any of that.  And they'll only be able to speak . . . when spoken to.  In other words, we'll have a fake democracy that restricts a more liberal and more nonwhite segment of the population from participating in the governmental process.

Thank you for talkin' to me South Africa!

Yes, as Thomas Hobbes once said, life is "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," and in America that goes double. 😠 

Georgia Rhythm - A New Beginning

In the same way that Friday the 13th, Part V was a new beginning. Just when you think voter suppression, like Jason Voorhees, is dead, well, like Jason, it comes back.

The Republican-majority Georgia legislature passed - and the illegitimate Governor Brian Kemp signed - a new law tightening the screws on restricting he vote in the state. The law now mandates, among other things, voter ID for absentee ballots, a limit on the number of mail-in drop boxes, and the right of the state to take over a local elections board where fraud is "suspected."   It also bans giving food and drink to people waiting in line to vote on the grounds that it constitutes electoral bribery.

President Biden has vowed to do everything he can to fight voter suppression in Georgia and elsewhere - 42 other states, including my home state of New Jersey, have some form of voter restriction legislation pending in their legislatures - which is a way of saying he can do very little.  The President of the United States cannot unilaterally overrule a state's election laws (though Trump tried), and the voter-right law in Congress can't pass without eliminating the filibuster in the Senate, something Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia isn't prepared to support.  I have also heard - I don't know how true this is - that Senate Democrats have suggested excepting any legislation related to voting rights from the filibuster rule, but Manchin reportedly doesn't even want to make that exception.

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who was elected in a runoff for a special election to complete an unexpired Senate term, has made getting this legislation through and to President Biden's desk for his signature a priority, and he plans to persuade Republicans who are on record as having supported renewals of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  If Warnock, above, can do that, he should consider selling ice cubes to Eskimos.  Because Republican senators are no longer in Congress to vote in favor of the interests of the general public.  They're there to satisfy the far-right GOP base.  And the base wants stricter voting requirements to stop Democrats from stealing elections (which Democrats do by voting legally). 

Senator Warnock is noncommittal on the issue of boycotts of Georgia-based businesses and calls to move events scheduled for Atlanta, or Augusta (like the Masters), elsewhere, preferring instead to focus on what he can do about voting rights in Washington.  I say, he's fated to lose his fight and also lose his bid for a full six-year Senate term in 2022, thanks to the new law - and will have be content with just continuing to pastor Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta come 2023.  The odds are simply against him.  But then, what do I know?  Three months ago this time, I didn't think he'd even get elected to the Senate in the runoff.

Marking Territories

And now, to answer some questions about the new Republican House:

How is the Republican majority in the House of Representatives demonstrating its desire to listen to the people?

It is demonstrating so by moving to strip the House delegates from U.S. overseas territories and the District of Columbia of their right to vote in proceedings of the House Committee of the Whole, denying the representatives of five million American citizens and the citizens themselves the right to have their voices heard in Congress.

What is the House Committee of the Whole?

The Committee of the Whole is a parliamentary device in which the House of Representatives is considered a congressional committee en masse. It needs a quorum of a bare majority to meet, and it facilitates the passage of bills to be voted on by the House. The Committee of the Whole can recommend amendments to a bill, and the House then has to approve these amendments before they're added to a final bill. A vote this committee has been the only way for territorial delegates to have a say in anything.

Why would the Republicans strip this committee vote from the territorial delegates?

I haven't found any logic or explanation for this rule, but I imagine that Speaker Boehner would point out that American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, along with the District of Columbia, are not states and so do not have the full rights of statehood, which include voting representation in Congress and, except for the District of Columbia, the right to vote in general presidential elections. This country, Speaker Boehner would likely tell us, is called the United States of America, not the United States and Territories of America.

But if a territorial vote on the Committee of the Whole is technically different from a vote in the House in toto, doesn't it therefore make common sense to give territorial delegates at least the committee vote?

Yes, but the Republican party defies common sense on a regular basis.

Wasn't there one state that joined the Union but then didn't have its statehood certified for 150 years?

Yes. Ohio was admitted to the Union in 1803 after four years as a territory, but Congress never passed a resolution of admission until the oversight was discovered in 1953. A new petition was then sent by Ohio to Congress for statehood, which was approved as being retroactive to 1803. Hence, from a technical standpoint, Ohio illegally sent delegates with full voting rights to both houses of Congress, chose Electoral College members who voted for President and Vice President, and helped decide all matters of national importance for a century and a half. In that same time, Ohio also participated in bicameral votes on eleven declarations of war.

What state does Speaker Boehner come from again?

Ohio.

How bad does this look in light of Boehner's insistences that he believes in openness and the voice of the people?

Worse than you may realize. At best, this rule change suggests pure partisan politics on the part of Republicans in an effort to weaken the Democrats, as the territories and the District of Columbia are overwhelmingly Democratic. At worst, it suggests racism, as the five million constituents affected by this action are mostly blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Pacific Islanders. Millions of brown people - American citizens all - have been told that their congressional delegates can't even vote on parliamentary House concerns and so have no voice of their own. People from these territories and the District of Columbia, like their delegates, are pretty much expected to be seen but not heard . . . and sometimes not even be seen.

Wouldn't it make sense to admit these territories to the Union as states? Certainly Puerto Rico, with over three million people, should receive full statehood. And why not make Washington, D.C. a state, as the cities of Bremen and Hamburg are states of Germany? Or just abolish the District of Columbia and make Washington a part of Maryland, as the Canadian capital of Ottawa is a part of the province of Ontario, if the idea of two permanent Democratic Senate seats bothers people? Why not do any of that?

You're so cute. I wish I could look at you through a Webcam right now.

What was the main beef of the Tea Party activists responsible for this Republican House majority in the 112th Congress?

It was that congressional representatives should be more accountable to the people.

This is ironic, no?

This is ironic, no is right. What this is is hypocritical.