President Biden, who called his presidential campaign a battle for the soul of America, gave one of the most impassioned speeches of his political career in Philadelphia last week calling out “the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.” Biden bluntly identified exactly who’s responsible for this national assault on American democracy.
“We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote. Have you no shame?”
The problem for our democracy is an overwhelming majority of elected Republicans at all levels of government already have loudly answered Biden’s direct question with a resounding “No!” Last month every single one of the 50 Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted to block even debating Democratic legislation to set minimum national standards to protect every American’s right to vote. This at a time when Republican state legislators throughout the nation are passing what Biden correctly described as vicious new forms of voter suppression and election perversion.
“State legislatures want to make it harder for you to vote,” Biden said. “And if you vote, they want to be able to tell you your vote doesn’t count for any reason they make up. They want the ability to reject the final count and ignore the will of the people if their preferred candidate loses.”
Everyone knows the source of this obscene perversion of American democracy. It was the criminal activity defeated Republican president Donald Trump urged Republican state election officials to commit by finding 11,780 votes to reverse his election loss to Biden in Georgia and throwing out enough Democratic votes in Arizona to do the same thing. The new Republican state election laws would fulfill Trump’s fondest dreams. They would end vote-counting under non-partisan election administrators and give Republican legislators the power to overturn any election results they don’t like.
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Note: PolitiFact, the fact-checking column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, called Biden’s charge Republican legislatures want to overturn election results when they lose “too speculative for us to render a Truth-O-Meter rating” whether it was true or false. But it confirmed many state election laws proposed or passed by Republicans throughout the country including in Wisconsin raise the possibility. That’s certainly what Trump urged Republicans to do. There’s nothing speculative about that.
The Big Lie
“The Big Lie (Trump’s outrageous lie he won by a landslide) is just that: a big lie,” Biden declared. “In America, if you lose, you accept the results. You follow the Constitution. You try again. You don’t call facts ‘fake’ and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy. That’s not statesmanship; that’s selfishness. That’s not democracy; it’s the denial of the right to vote.”
The most pointless debate in politics today is whether any elected Republicans actually believe Trump’s absurd lie he won an election he so clearly lost. It really doesn’t matter. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, appropriately enough, a novel about a double agent in Nazi Germany: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.” It doesn’t matter whether Republicans are just pretending to oppose democracy to win support from Trump’s insurrectionists or to protect their own lives in case that violent mob returns to the Capitol again with nooses, baseball bats and hockey sticks. They are who they pretend to be.
Challenge the Filibuster
The problem for Biden and the Democrats — and for all the rest of America — is under current Senate filibuster rules passing federal legislation protecting voting rights requires support from 10 Senate Republicans and right now there are none. Democrats controlling the Senate could change the filibuster rule, but there’s another problem. At least two Democratic Senators— Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — publicly oppose changing the filibuster.
So democracy’s dead because two Democratic senators like the filibuster better than democracy, right? Hardly. Republican attempts to stop Americans from voting have created an enormous voter backlash against Republicans in recent years. In 2018, the largest midterm election turnout in 50 years won Democrats control of the House of Representatives. The largest voter turnout in history ended Trump’s angry, anti-democracy presidency after one term. Another massive voter turnout in 2022 would be the natural response to the concerted national assault on voting by Republican legislatures.
Massive turnout can overwhelm even the most corrupt Republican gerrymandering of House elections. Statewide Senate elections can’t be gerrymandered at all. That gives Democrats prime opportunities to increase their Senate majority by flipping Republican Senate seats in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Missouri and Florida.
Who knows? Maybe Democrats won’t even need Manchin and Sinema to save democracy, end the filibuster and pass Biden’s agenda.
