Trump and the GOP’s biggest voting rights lies — and why they’re
UPDATE (Jan. 19. 2022, 9:00 p.m. ET): After hours of debate on the Senate floor, Democratic leaders failed to break the GOP’s voting rights blockade and advance the two voting rights bills via cloture vote.
The moment of truth on voting rights has come.
The Senate this week finally took up its debate on voting rights legislation. Republicans were not able to use the filibuster to block this vital deliberation — as they did four times last year. Democrats have achieved this because Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., used a little-known procedure that allowed the Senate to send the new voting rights bill — passed in the House last week — directly to the Senate floor.
Former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen set off a disastrous domino effect at the federal, state and local levels.
The new legislation combines the two major voting rights measures: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. All 50 Democratic and independent senators served as co-sponsors of the two bills. Though news analysts and commentators have declared the legislative fight over before it started, Senate supporters must do whatever it takes to pass the legislation, just as Senate supporters did to pass momentous civil rights legislation in the past. This battle is not over until it is over.
These protections are crucial — state legislatures passed a wave of voter suppression and election sabotage laws last year, and even more of these laws are expected in 2022.
Former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen set off a disastrous domino effect at the federal, state and local levels. Americans are now being regularly fed lies about election integrity — lies by elected officials, GOP leaders and Republican senators. On top of these lies are more layers of inaccuracies, falsehoods and myths that add to the confusion.
The Senate’s key voting right bill has majority support, but it will require a modification of the filibuster rules — something that has routinely been done more than 160 times since 1969. The support of a simple majority is all that is needed to pass this modification, but Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., continue to oppose modifying the rules. Without their support, historic voting rights legislation will fail.
Yet, just last month, Manchin and Sinema had no trouble voting to modify the filibuster rules to allow debt ceiling legislation to pass by a majority vote.
Manchin and Sinema insist they support voting rights. But if they maintain their current position, they are essentially supporting every state voter suppression law enacted last year, which the Senate bill would override. They are also supporting every state law that empowers partisan GOP election officials to rig the outcomes of federal elections.
In fighting for the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 to overcome Jim Crow laws, the bill’s supporters recognized it…
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