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Democrats would love to pass two major voting rights bills: the ambitious People’s Law and the updated Voting Rights Act of 1965, which John Roberts’ Supreme Court struck down in 2013. The latter is known. as the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advance Act and despite using the late congressman’s full name, not a only Republican voted in favor. They should have considered calling it the Robert E. Lee Voting Rights Act. Rep. Lewis would have been fine with the name change if it protected voting rights. He never wanted glory, only results.

President Joe Biden would love to sign both bills. The problem is that Democrats control the House, but only technically control the Senate, because filibuster or the Democratic Face Puncher 9000 gives Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a veto on all legislation. He is willing to rebuild some roads but not to preserve voting rights. That makes sense because white people use the roads.

The voting rights group Fair Fight commissioned polls in Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The results shouldn’t surprise anyone, including McConnell’s favorite Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

NBC News reports:

Fifty-four percent to 64 percent of the voters surveyed in each state support the idea of ​​senators passing simple majority voting bills, not the 60 votes currently required by the obstructionist Senate rules.

You see, 60 is not a magic number, and people who support democracy generally believe in majority rule, not McConnell’s.

Voting rights legislation, including the broad campaign and election finance reform of the Por el Pueblo Act, is popular, and not because Republicans haven’t tried. McConnell slammed the law for the people as “socialism for political consultants” that “will forcibly rewrite each state’s electoral laws in ways that defy common sense and are deeply unpopular with American voters.” The former is not a thing and the latter is a lie. Senator Mike Lee of Utah stated “all about the [For the People Act] it’s rotten to the core. This is a bill as if the devil himself wrote it in hell. ”Lee probably assumes that Satan was one of the sponsors of the Social Security Act of 1935.

All this heightened rhetoric has not soured the public about voting rights. This is a coup legislation, but the main obstacle remains Manchin and Sinema, lovers of filibustering. Manchin even offered a compromise bill that McConnell immediately dismissed because Stacey Abrams liked it. He’s that petty and racist. Meanwhile, Sinema is as useless as C-3P0 in the Millennium Falcon.

Sinema was recently asked whether he would support an exception to filibuster to save democracy just this once, and his response from spokesperson Jonathan Lombard It was a concentrated dose of hot stupidity.

Removing that threshold to pass the voting rights legislation she supports would open the door for that legislation to be repealed entirely within a few years and replaced by a national voter identification law and restrictions on voting by mail in elections. Federals, further undermining the vote. rights in all states of the nation.

The inspiring Sinema believes we shouldn’t do anything now because Republicans could do worse later. She is an insult to the distinguished tradition of political irresponsibility. First of all, this exact same argument could have been made against the Affordable Care Act, that was much less popular, In 2010. Republicans tried to kill him when they took back Congress and the White House, but they failed, and don’t start talking about how filibuster saved him. The GOP’s so-called “skinny repeal” would have destroyed the ACA and led to 16 million Americans losing health care in the following year. By 2017, public support for the ACA had grown so much that the three “no” Republicans on the repeal – Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain – had voted against the bill in 2010.

Sinema once claimed that obstructionism promoted bipartisan consensus. That was proven silly when Ted Cruz personally blocked the Law For the People from actual discussion in the Senate. Republicans are not interested in debate or compromise. Sinema should have realized this when they tried to reverse the 2020 presidential election and then killed a bipartisan investigation into the January 6 insurrection.

Now, Senator Eeyore only offers defeatist rhetoric posing as traditionalism. Your spokesperson keep going up the specter of the “national voter identification law,” as if Democrats want people to vote with old Blockbuster video cards. Abrams has said that he does not oppose all voter identification laws, only those that Republicans specifically propose to disenfranchise people of color. Also, we have to fight the war we are in now.

Sinema claims he supports the right to vote, but it stays in his hands as the Republican Party relentlessly passes statewide voter suppression laws with simple majorities. McConnell Considers Defeating Voting Rights Legislation your top priority, so you need to consider whose cause Sinema is really helping move forward.

[NBC News]

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