On voting rights, Biden talks and Republicans act

On voting rights, Biden talks and Republicans act

Opinion by 

Paul Waldman

Columnist

July 12, 2021|Updated today at 1:09 p.m. EDT

Edward Jones waits to testify before House and Senate committees in Austin on July 10. (Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images)

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This Tuesday, President Biden will travel to Philadelphia to make what will surely be an inspiring speech about the sacredness of the right to vote and how important it is that every American have free access to the ballot.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Republicans are barreling forward with a law meant to make voting more difficult, especially for people of color and those who live in cities, since they might be more inclined to vote for Democrats. It’s only the latest in a wave of GOP voter suppression laws.

In other words: A president goes to a location weighted with symbolism to deliver a piece of rhetoric, while 1,400 miles away, the opposition party engages in an exercise of raw power.

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Or, put another way, while Biden hopes he can persuade the country to be bound by what we say our fundamental values and commitments are, Republicans are unconcerned about whether anyone agrees with them or not. And while Biden faces complicated and perhaps insurmountable hurdles to achieve his goal of strengthening voting rights, Republicans in the second-largest state only need a couple of days to undermine them.

Over the weekend, committees in both houses of the Texas legislature passed versions of the GOP voter suppression bill. It will:

Prevent county election officials from using methods such as drive-through voting and 24-hour voting that made the process more convenient in 2020

Restrict the ability of voters to have other people deliver their absentee ballots (of particular concern to voters with disabilities)

Impose new ID requirements for absentee ballots

Give partisan poll watchers greater freedom to observe vote-counting, which is likely to increase harassment of election officials by the kind of extremist conspiracy theorists performing the ballot “audit” in Arizona

Though there has been almost no documented fraud in the state, the Republican position is now that even the hypothetical possibility of fraud is ample justification to make voting difficult or impossible for huge numbers of voters. “Voting is not supposed to be easy,” one Republican testified to the legislature. “That’s what our men died for.”

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It’s a curious view of the impetus for the United States’ wars; I’m no historian, but I don’t remember the tale of Audie Murphy shouting “This is so voting will always be difficult!” as he charged a German machine gun nest.

What’s most important here is that the Republicans waging this desperate fight to make voting harder know they don’t have to persuade anyone they’re right. If there’s a backlash against their efforts, they can live with it; indeed, part of the point of voter suppression is to insulate them from backlash over anything they do.

They have to convince their own supporters only that they’re right, and that’s a relatively easy task, since mass opinion follows elite opinion, and they know that the Republican base never had any particular commitment to abstract ideas about democracy in the first place.

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In fact, the more controversial the Republican efforts are, the more Democrats will be heard shouting that democracy is being undermined, and the less committed Republican voters will then become to fundamental democratic principles. If the dastardly liberals are the ones saying every American should be able to vote, then Republican voters will conclude that every American being able to vote is a horrifying idea that must be quashed (if they didn’t already believe that).

That brings us to the core of the dilemma Democrats face: All the undemocratic features of the American system make it even harder to protect or enhance democracy.

So right now, we have a Supreme Court with a 6-to-3 conservative majority that will uphold nearly any voter suppression law and strike down nearly any effort to strengthen voting rights. Five of those six justices were appointed by Republican presidents who initially took office only because of the electoral college after losing the popular vote.

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We have a Senate that gives outsize power to conservative states, where Republicans can kill voting legislation with the use of the filibuster. We have states such as Texas and Georgia where Republicans have successfully gerrymandered themselves into state-legislative majorities that they can maintain even as they lose more and more support from the voters.

So what is Biden going to do about it?

There isn’t much indication that the president takes the problem seriously enough. Vice President Harris recently announced a $25 million Democratic Party campaign to boost registration and turnout, but that’s almost laughably small. If they truly appreciated the threat now being posed to their future political success and to the very existence of democracy, they’d spend a hundred times as much.

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Voting rights advocates want Biden to make the issue a higher priority. As Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, put it: “We must have the president use his voice.” But what will his voice, loud though it might be, accomplish?

We shouldn’t prejudge his Philadelphia speech; perhaps it will be so moving that it will define a generation and produce demonstrable change. But I doubt Republicans are too worried. They know this isn’t about persuasion. It’s about power.