Voting Rights or the Filibuster—Choose One
However momentarily stirring President Joe Biden’s call last week to protect democracy, there’s a huge gap between word and deed.
Biden directly confronted the effects of Donald Trump’s Big Lie campaign; the fruitless, violent Jan. 6 attempted insurrection; and the cultural civil war Trump spawned. But one speech won’t make it all go away.
We expect fistfights over mask requirements on closed airplane cabins or book banning from public libraries if a single resident complains.
We’re insisting on conflating inconveniences of public health measures from Covid with the perceived politics of liberty.
We’re seeing targeted attacks on individuals, Left and Right, who speak out with even a single word triggering debasement.
It’s getting worse, not better.
And whether you liked Biden’s speech or not, the real question is what we’re going to do about it all.
Vox news called Biden’s speech “hollow.”
Whether you liked Biden’s speech or not, the real question is what we’re going to do about it all.
For Biden and Democrats, an important step is the protection of voter rights; for Republicans, the same passion is being spent on voter limits of various sorts in the name of vote integrity.
We’re familiar with the political terrain here. Nothing passes in the evenly split U.S. Senate unless a rule change is adopted to change Senate rules to blunt filibuster protocols demanding a 60-vote majority for almost anything of substance to pass.
The current alternatives include wiping away filibuster majorities altogether or segregating voting rights to allow a 51-vote majority on an issue seen as central to maintaining democracy.
A Deeper, Broader Opposition
A pair of recent Washington Post unabashedly conservative op-ed essays warn outwardly that any attempt to change the rules to force federal voting rights protections will boomerang as part of a continuing and widening turn in American values.
Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen, talking of the death of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, used on the last filibuster change, the one allowing a loosened vote for judicial nominees, to show how a Mitch McConnell as the Republican leader could end up using exactly those rule changes to change the political complexion of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Columnist Hugh Hewitt, anticipating Republican gains next November, goes further to say he is betting on McConnell, R-Ky., to use the new rules to run the Republican table on a whole range of issues to overturn federal regulations, environmental rules, tax and immigration changes and the like. Hewitt himself proposes a comprehensive measure that obliges school districts receiving federal funds to end public employee unions in schools.
And he notes, Democrats somehow get by their own divisiveness to enact a voting rights measure, the 6-to-3 conservative Supreme Court will strike it down.
Away from Congress, we see a host of would-be Trump political acolytes lining up to carry on the traditions of perceived Trump populism, should Trump himself not be available as a presidential candidate in 2024.
And the continued popularity and unrestrained misinformation campaigns being waged by right-leaning media and social media posts guarantee a continuing life for more of the measures and actions that Biden’s speech warned are holding a knife to America’s small-d democratic throat.
Words Without Deeds
Words without action don’t go far, of course, but neither do policies without people carrying them through to action. Rules, like all measures, are either tools or weapons, depending on the hands that take them up.
As Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., showed recently a single senator using the rules to hold up appointments of scores of diplomats is serving his own agenda, not the good of the country. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has held up an entire presidential legislative agenda, apparently without significant repercussion or accountability to party or constituents.
Without Senate flexibility on its current rule set, this Congress will not pass voting rights legislation; Republicans have no interest in any bipartisan approach, just as they have no interest in supporting Biden spending proposals. The Senate’s operating rules have rendered Congress permanently gridlocked.
Without Congress, this president can’t do much to make his words become real. Indeed, his words last week had no concrete proposals to move voting rights ahead.
And we, as voters, insist year after year on returning the same split Congresses, with tiny party majorities, back to the same jobs to do the same job over and over. It’s nuts.
Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court hearing on challenges to Biden’s moves to order businesses of more than 100 workers to put public health measures in place reflected a concern on the part of all the justices, but particularly the conservative judges, about why Congress cannot act quickly during an emergency to detail powers about vaccines, for example.
It’s the Doing part that’s at issue. For various political issues, Congress can’t act, the president can’t act, the courts don’t think they should and we don’t send enough of one side or another to Congress to change it.
The new mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, vowed last week to be judged by whether he can Get Stuff Done. That would be an interesting message for Washington, too.