Nothing is more urgent than breaking the GOP voting rights blockade
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats once again brought a major voting bill to the floor — and Senate Republicans once again blocked it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) railed that Democrats sought “to start tearing up the ground rules of our democracy and writing new ones, of course on a purely partisan basis.” That is rich. In state after state, Republicans have done precisely what Mr. McConnell describes, raising gratuitous barriers to the ballot box in search of partisan advantage, justified by fantasies about election fraud. Republicans’ falsehood-fueled campaign against the nation’s system of government is one of the reasons the country needs federal voting legislation.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that Democrats would continue trying to break the blockade, pledging that voting legislation would be the first order of business when the Senate returned from its August recess.
Democrats must keep trying, but with a new approach. Their voting bill is a sprawling collection of reforms covering judicial ethics, campaign finance, gerrymandering, voting procedures and much else. A thinner bill focused on ensuring free and fair voting would make it less defensible for Republicans to oppose — and easier for Democrats to rally around. The bill could include early voting requirements, absentee ballot standards, automatic voter registration, limits on partisan redistricting, safeguards that insulate vote-counting from partisan pressure, voting technology upgrades, vote auditing standards and election security improvements. It could fix the Voting Rights Act, which the Supreme Court has unwisely eviscerated. If such a bill attracted no Republican support, it would clarify that GOP opposition is based on the fear that more people voting would translate into fewer Republicans winning.
Mr. Schumer announced Wednesday that Democrats are embracing this strategy. The majority leader touted the efforts of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and other lawmakers to craft slimmer voting legislation, indicating that, once released, their proposal would replace the larger bill that Democrats have failed to move. Mr. Manchin has already released an outline for a compromise that includes national voter ID standards, a longtime GOP goal, along with vote-enabling reforms that no one committed to democracy should oppose.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/14/nothing-is-more-urgent-than-breaking-gop-voting-rights-blockade/
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