Photo: OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP / Getty Images
For: Maribel Hastings Updated 19 Jan 2022, 48: 16 pm EST
The stagnation in the Senate of the measures aimed at protecting the right to vote in this country is another reminder that, without action on this front, it is very difficult for legislation in other areas to advance , including immigration and climate change.
The logic is simple and complicated at the same time. If the votes of millions of people who want reforms on various issues, including immigration, are suppressed, the politicians who are elected are less likely to advance the issues of interest to these communities. What can be expected when the next president opposes this reform?
We do not have to imagine much, because we have already experienced it with Donald J. Trump and his Machiavellian adviser on immigration issues, Stephen Miller, by imposing draconian measures, among many others, that of separating babies from their parents at the border.
Many will say that it matters little who is elected, since nothing has happened on immigration under Democrat Joe Biden. Not good, let’s say, because a good part of Trump’s nefarious policies have not been able to be stopped in the Biden presidency. The explanation is more elaborate than that. Two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have literally paralyzed Biden’s agenda by opposing efforts to change the Senate’s filibuster rules so they don’t require 60 votes to initiate debate on a measure but a simple majority. Democrats have 20 votes and two independents who vote Democrat. The tie-breaking vote is in the hands of Vice President Kamala Harris in her capacity as President of the Senate. But without Manchin and Sinema, the Democrats fall short.
The chances of changing the rule are remote and, meanwhile, we are entering a year of mid-term elections where control of Congress, now in Democrat hands by a narrow margin, is at stake.
Despite the trauma it has caused for this nation the presidency of Donald J. Trump and despite the fact that he led a coup attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s legitimate victory in the general election of 2020, the protection of the right to vote of minorities in the face of the assault of Republican legislatures and governorships throughout the country does not seem to be taken with the urgency that it deserves among some Democratic sectors. This goes beyond symbolism and wanting the measures to be approved in the Senate to coincide with the commemoration of the birth of the iconic civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. By now the symbolism is too much. Action is needed urgently, and that action is possible by changing the filibuster rules.
Without additional protections at the federal level, states , on all the republican states that have approved measures to restrict the vote of minorities, they will do whatever it takes to suppress that vote and they will do it using state laws without the federal government having any remedy.
The result is not difficult to imagine. Suppressing the vote benefits Republican candidates whose agenda does not take into account the interests of minority voters. Worse still, in some of those Republican state Legislatures measures have been presented that seek to reverse the certification that a Secretary of State makes of an electoral result, especially if it is not to his liking.
Precisely the measures stalled in the Senate seek that the Department of Justice may have interference in protecting the rights of voters in those states with a history of discriminating against voters of color.
So it is clear that the measures to protect the right to vote and in this case its stagnation, does affect other issues on the legislative agenda. Archaic rules such as the filibuster also affect measures that help millions of people, such as infrastructure or immigration reform, from seeing the light of day because a minority has more weight than the majority.
Interestingly, it was Martin Luther King, Jr. himself who explained it clearly ago 59 years, in the midst of fighting for the civil rights law, by saying the following about obstructionism:
“ It seems to me that the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use filibuster to prevent the majority of the people from voting.”
Unfortunately, very little has changed since then.