Yeah, you should read what Princhester actually wrote in this thread, because I’m responding to his specific statements, and not against a vague, “Well, voting rights are really important,” position.
You put “prioritize voting rights” in quotes in your post which made me feel you were commenting on the principle at least as much as you were responding to Princhester. As somebody who brought this principle into the conversation, I wanted to respond to that. Princhester can respond to what was directed at him.
Well, now you know better.
My frustration isn’t when the allies are flawed, it’s when they stop being allies by not voting in the mid-terms.
Here’s what I would like to see.
The Democrats should put together a group of substantial voting rights protections and reforms. (I won’t cause further distraction by putting forth details. The specifics are a topic for another thread.) They should present it to the public by Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and other party leaders. They should make it clear that these aren’t just a set of principles; these are bills they will be submitting and intend to see enacted as laws. Where necessary, they are proposed constitutional amendments that they will be sending to the states for ratification. And they should highlight the abuses that are occurring under our current system which they are addressing.
The Republicans will then face a choice. They can announce their support for voting rights in which case the Democrats can say “Great, good to hear we agree on the importance of voting. We’ll be submitting these bills Monday and we’ll watch you guys vote with us to enact them.”
Or the Republicans can say “No, we think this is all a socialist plot and we oppose this plan.” And the Democrats can say “Yes, we pretty much expected this. But we’re not dropping this issue.”
And then the Democrats should make voting rights a central issue in this year’s elections. Democratic candidates should state they support the voting rights bills and will vote for them if they are elected. Republicans should be forced to say they either support or oppose the bills. And Democrats should be saying “We are going to enact voting rights. The Republicans are not. If you think this country deserves voting rights, vote for Democrats. If you oppose voting rights, vote for Republicans. You, as voters, need to pick a side on this issue.”
Yes, the Republicans will be out there telling their usual lies and trying to distort what’s being said. But the Democrats need to fight back and tell the truth, over and over again. The Democrats need to stop trying to seek a common ground that nobody objects to.
If the Democrats win on Election Day, they should move forward and enact the voting rights bills into laws and push for ratification of the associated amendments. Then when voting rights are in place and people can vote for who they wish to, I feel the Democrats will have the popular support to win elections and enact all of the other good ideas that Republicans will no longer have the strength to block.
If, on the other hand, the Republicans are able to win on Election Day, it will mean one of two things. Either the Republicans have succeeded in taking enough control of the electoral process that they can win whenever they want or the people have decided they don’t care enough about their own rights to protect them. In either case, I will then join those who despair the end of democracy in America.
That said, I don’t think this will happen. The 2020 election showed that people can be motivated to get off their asses and go out and vote if they feel the issue is important enough. And that if enough people go out and vote, they can rise above Republican efforts to rig elections. So I feel this is a fight we can win if we put the work into making people see it as a fight worth winning.
Unfortunately most of this, short of the campaigning on voting rights, has already happened.
The Democrats are failing on voting rights as a campaign issue. The GOP has successfully tied it to a winning message for them - that voter ID should be required - even though that isn’t actually the issue at all.
The Democrats have a huge uphill battle getting voters to care about this, but unfortunately they massively undercut their own position by having these legislative failures with voting rights. The average swing voter basically thinks that the Democrats control the government so they must just be crying wolf on issues they don’t really care about when they campaign on things that they aren’t actually doing.
It’s not impossible to win a messaging war with the truth but it’s fairly difficult when you aren’t able to present a consistent case.
The Dems are also obviously further undercut by the fact that they need to do well in states like Arizona and Georgia where they’re already facing voter suppression laws under the current regime.
This is my point. The Republicans have been able to whittle away voting rights because the Democrats haven’t made it a central campaign issue. I’m saying they should make it a central campaign issue.
I agree that they really have no choice but to try to message on this.
I unfortunately think it’s an uphill battle given how this has already gone with legislation/the courts/how messaging has already gone.
I’d definitely add Florida to that list. Ron DeSantis won the governor’s office in 2018 by a margin of 33,000 votes. There are 1,700,000 adult citizens in Florida who are disenfranchised. DeSantis would never have won in a fair election. George W. Bush wouldn’t have won a fair election in 2000 and Donald Trump wouldn’t have won a fair election in 2016 either. And we’d be a much better country if people like Bush and Trump and DeSantis weren’t winning unfair elections and holding office.
Let me be clear; I do not want to suppress conservative voters. I support people having the right to vote for candidates like Bush and Trump and DeSantis. I just want people to have the right to vote against them as well and I want their votes to count equally. All I want to see is a level playing field.
Just spitballing here, what if instead of putting all of that stuff into one mega bill, you brought them up separately? If you have a huge bill with all of the things Democrats want to accomplish on voting rights, the result of arduous concessions from the Democratic party to find something they all agree with on principle, chances are every single Republican will find a reason not to sign off on the bill. More importantly they aren’t going to read it. I’d be surprised if anyone else here on the boards has read the entire bill currently before the senate.
If you present thirty or fifty smaller bills covering just one or two things each, I think for at least some of the bills you can find >60 people who have no objection whatsoever.
This isn’t budget reconciliation - you aren’t limited to one act per year.
~Max
Please describe the voting rights package with 10 Senate Republican votes.
Admittedly there isn’t a ton of daylight between Republican-proposed voting reform and what I’ve read in the For the People Act. But this is something proposed by Rick Scott (R-FL) last year (S.459),
(a) Minimum Presence Of Election Observers.—The appropriate State or local election official shall permit at least 2 representatives of each candidate appearing on the ballot in a general election for Federal office to observe the tabulation of the ballots in the election.
Which I think is very similar - although not going as far - to Section 307, Subsection (b), paragraph (2)(C), as created by Section 1621 of the For the People Act of 2021 (H.R.1).
An election official may not make a determination that a discrepancy exists between the signature on an absentee ballot and the signature of the individual who submits the ballot on the official list of registered voters in the State or other official record or other document used by the State to verify the signatures of voters unless–
(i) at least 2 election officials make the determination;
(ii) each official who makes the determination has received training in procedures used to verify signatures; and
(iii) of the officials who make the determination, at least one is affiliated with the political party whose candidate received the most votes in the most recent statewide election for Federal office held in the State and at least one is affiliated with the political party whose candidate received the second most votes in the most recent statewide election for Federal office held in the State.
~Max
It occurs to me, this is sort of a hijack, so I’ll stop.
~Max
…I’m not entirely sure why anyone thinks that this matters any more.
They don’t care.
They are locked into their own eco-system of constant dis-information and propaganda.
They will probably never ever see the message" If you oppose voting rights, vote for Republicans." and if they do see it they will think its a lie.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with putting together a group of substantial voting rights protections and reforms. It should absolutely be presented it to the public by Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and other party leaders. They should make it clear that these aren’t just a set of principles; these are bills they will be submitting and intend to see enacted as laws. Where necessary, they are proposed constitutional amendments that they will be sending to the states for ratification. And they should highlight the abuses that are occurring under our current system which they are addressing.
They absolutely should be doing all of this.
But they shouldn’t be doing it for the reasons you say. It isn’t about the messaging. This isn’t a PR campaign. It doesn’t matter what they think. You aren’t going to outmanoeuvre them, because they are already several steps ahead of you and have you surrounded on all flanks.
You do it because it’s a necessary step to preserve democracy.
And there are about a hundred other things they should be prioritising right now as well. And the current crisis: that needs more attention than anything else right now, are the attacks on the LGBT community, in particular the attacks on transgender people.
This happened in Florida today.
Now the guidance doesn’t explicitly state this (instead weaseling out by linking to a study that does) and most doctors will probably ignore it, and if it came to it would likely fail in the courts.
But the intentions here are very clear. Genocide. They want trans people to stop existing.
You either decide to fight this: or you don’t.
There is no binary solution to the crisis you are in right now. Because there is one side that is doing everything it can to fuck you over. They have you out-flanked. They have you out-gunned. They have no scruples. They will lie, they will pivot, they will ignore you.
The question posed by the OP of this thread is “Will we ever fight back?”
I think that its a fight you can win if you decide to put up a fight. But we aren’t even there yet. Hoping that democratic leadership will take the steps needed to bring substantial voting rights protections and reforms isn’t going to win you the next election.
If you do win it it will be just like the last time: won at the margins by grassroots (largely marginalised) activists who are out there right now working on the ground, trying to make a difference.
On voting rights specifically, grassroots activism isn’t going to be as effective as it was in the 60s. In the 60s, grassroots activism only translated to federal action because the segregationists weren’t in control of a political party, and the leadership party they hitched their wagon to was actively working to undermine their position. Not to mention the segregationists were dumb enough to actively make themselves the violent party and play into the hands of activists that opposed them. In America we have a combination of a FPTP system that is mostly about party leadership (for better or worse) bullying the rank and file and a society at large where any real alternative to institutional reform (i.e. violence or a large-scale shutdown of the economy) isn’t possible for a variety of reasons.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I was picturing this as a set of bills; not a single omnibus bill. I agree it would be easier to get a collection of separate bills passed individually rather than a single bill covering all the same items.
But that’s not a key issue for me. I’d have no problem with an omnibus approach if professionals felt it would work better.
Until the influence of big money is eliminated from politics, you are pissing into the wind. Want a level playing field? Reverse Citizens United or whatever that Supreme Court case was called, and get a handle on lobbying. Many problems would soon be solved. High drug prices, out of control health care costs and non-taxation of billionaires would be the first to become history.
Correct. That ended attempts at gerrymandering in Canada. But Canada went further, establishing a neutral commission that was in charge of electoral district boundaries (we call our electoral districts “ridings”), and who tries to keep the ridings at about 100,000 people, give or take. Elections Canada, the name of the commission, is necessarily neutral; and redraws the boundaries every so often, regardless of demographics. For example, the city of Lethbridge, Alberta hit more than 100,000 a few years ago, and was spun off into its own riding, outside of what it was in. Another seat to the House of Commons was added, and there was nothing any government or party was able to do about it.
That’s what puzzles me about American districts–that the party in power, at the state level, can redraw them on a whim, and in many cases, they do resemble salamanders (i.e. gerrymanders). That seems advantageous to the governing party, and in no way fair to all voters.
Note that I am not saying that America’s approach is better or worse, but I, and I am sure many Canadians, find it puzzling.
[End hijack.]
I don’t know that they do them on a whim, but they do need to do them when a census count changes the number of reps a state has.
A neutral commission sounds good, but how do you ensure that it remains “necessarily neutral”? Corruption finds its way everywhere.
Personally, I’m a fan of a random walk method of generating districts. Just split a state up by population, however you want to do it, and then randomly trade precincts in and out of the districts until the projected delegations approach the actual political leanings of the population.
Either that or get rid of districts altogether and do a statewide ranked choice system, but that requires a whole lot of other changes as well as voter education. So, while I’m certainly not against it, it’s not necessarily what I would choose if I were given unilateral power on how to settle this.
Please identify the 10 Republicans who will be voting for any of these bills.