Surrendering to Republicans on Voting Rights Won't Save Democracy
Right now, voting rights in America are subject to a condition of partisan gridlock in Washington that preserves Republicans ability to wreak havoc on voting and election laws in the states they control. So long as centrist Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to consider a carve-out for voting-rights legislation to liberate it from the Senate filibuster, thats where things will stand at least through the 2022 elections, in which the GOP has a very good shot at busting up the current Democratic trifecta.
The Manchin-Sinema position is that voting-rights protections must be enacted by a bipartisan coalition to instill confidence in the system given the Trump-induced mistrust that metastasized during and after the 2020 elections, inspiring the attempted and ongoing MAGA coup to challenge or overturn the results. The central question now is what happens when (its no longer really a matter of if) it becomes unmistakably clear that Republicans wont cooperate with compromise efforts like those in which Manchin has engaged twice this year.
At the invaluable Election Law Blog, Ohio State University professor Ned Foley answers the question by suggesting Democrats might just want to let the GOP do its worst for a while, assuming the worst doesnt fall below some hypothetical floor of minimal conditions necessary for an election to qualify as being small-d democratic. His basic argument provides sort of a theoretical underpinning for Manchins reflexive belief (sincere or merely tactical, given the very red political coloration of his state) that election reforms that arent bipartisan simply arent worth enacting.
Before critiquing Foleys take, I will emphasize that his counsel of strategic surrender for Democrats is contingent, not absolute: If Republicans violate the hypothetical floor that Foley discusses but does not define, then he says Democrats have no choice but to override GOP voter-suppression measures if they can, even if such partisan action exacerbates the GOPs electoral McCarthyism (his term for the Big Lie ideology of pervasive but never documented voter fraud claims).
Read more: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/09/democrats-surrendering-on-voting-rights-wont-save-democracy.html