June 11 , 2021
Democracy is on a collision course with itself. It is at the mercy of an elected body of people, half of whom are actively working to dismantle it and half of whom are so concerned with slavish adherence to tradition that they are willing to sacrifice the entire 245 year experiment in self-governance on the altar of outmoded procedure.
On Sunday, Joe Manchin published a garbled op-ed in The West Virginia Gazette trumpeting his opposition to the For the People Act. Since Mondaire Jones dispatched with Manchin’s specious arguments here, as did Baltimore Sun columnist Peter Jensen here, there’s no need to repeat them. Manchin’s opposition is frustrating, but hardly surprising. He is a Democratic Senator from a state that voted 2-1 for Trump. Whether his racist indifference to the voting rights of Black people is performative or bone deep really doesn’t matter. The result is the same.
Our focus should be on the 49 other Democratic senators and the Democratic President, who owe their majority and their presence in office to the Herculean efforts of BIPOC organizers who mobilized voters of color to deliver the margin of victory in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia (twice!).
Even if elected Democrats believe (mistakenly) that the voting rights of Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous Americans are an afterthought, their own self-interest should motivate them to pull out all the stops to protect voting rights. At last count, 14 states have already enacted a suite of harsh voter suppression laws aimed squarely at BIPOC citizens and 18 more states have similar legislation tee’d up, (Source: “Voting Laws Roundup: May 2021,” BrennanCtr.org, 5/28/21). Without the support of people of color Democrats will not win. They should be fighting like hell to protect voting rights, if only to keep their cushy government jobs.
Instead, in the wake of Manchin’s ridiculous salvo we hear crickets from President Biden, while civil rights leaders are forced to go and plead with Manchin to respect the Constitutional rights of Black people, (Source: “Sen. Manchin steadfast in opposition to voting rights bill after meeting with civil rights leaders,” by Mike DeBonis, Amy Gardner and Sean Sullivan, The Washington Post, 6/8/21). Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s tepid response was to promise to bring the bill to the floor this month, with no hint of a strategy for passage and no articulation of the critical urgency of protecting democracy.
With friends like these, it is easy to fall prey to despair. We can’t help but feel that we are doomed to an inexorable slide into autocracy. We fear that it will be ushered along by hapless handmaidens too insulated from the impact of their ineptitude to act until it’s too late, but we are not powerless. As Ezra Levin of Indivisible reminds us, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had to overcome a 54 day filibuster. If we want our senators to step up and protect democracy, we need to remind them who they work for. We will need to make some noise and make them uncomfortable. Summer is here. It’s time to hit the streets. Democracy depends on it.
#Indivisible.org