The good and the bad in Biden’s blistering attack on GOP voter suppression
Opinion by Greg Sargent
Columnist
July 13, 2021|Updated yesterday at 6:17 p.m. EDT
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President Biden just delivered a slashing indictment of the GOP’s ongoing assault on democracy in a speech in Philadelphia, and it contained good news and bad news.
The good news is that Biden went further than he has before — and further than most mainstream Democrats have — in casting the threat as forward-looking, as one that involves the glaring possibility of a future stolen election.
Biden referenced the numerous measures Republicans are pushing in the states that transfer control over election machinery to GOP-controlled state legislatures and otherwise will make it easier to overturn election results or pursue phony audits designed to cast doubt on them.
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“This is election subversion,” Biden said. “It’s the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.”
Biden added:
Some state legislatures want to make it harder for you to vote. And if you vote, they want to be able to tell you your vote doesn’t count for any reason they make up. They want the ability to reject the final count and ignore the will of the people if their preferred candidate loses.
That’s an important threshold to cross. Biden flatly declared that these efforts are about Republicans unshackling themselves from any obligation to abide by future election results while fully knowing that those results were perfectly legitimate, based on pretexts invented solely to fake-justify maximal efforts to overturn them.
That’s better than what we usually hear. Democrats regularly lament that Republicans remain beholden to former president Donald Trump and the “big lie,” which casts this as delusional, backward-looking, and merely a show of loyalty to Trump.
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Or Democrats lament that Republicans “actually believe” Trump won the election. This misses the crucial point that these sham audits and other “reviews” of results are experiments in creating fake rationales for overturning future results in the full knowledge that the results are sound.
It’s good that Biden articulated the threat this starkly. And he said all this without falling into the trap of downgrading other threats to democracy, such as voter suppression and other anti-majoritarian tactics.
Indeed, he wove all this into one large overarching threat to our constitutional order and to self-rule. And he linked it to previous moments in our history when the threat was as dire or worse.
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“The president delivered a forceful, passionate call to action,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), a leading voting-rights advocate, told me.
Now for the bad news
But if our democracy faces an existential threat — as Biden told us — then doesn’t it require him to prevail on Democrats to carve out an exception to the filibuster, to pass legislative fixes that will mitigate that threat?
Biden called for passage of the For the People Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would dramatically expand voting protections, curb GOP anti-democracy tactics and restore federal preclearance for changes in voting rules. And he vowed to work with Congress to get this done.
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But, as Ari Berman reports, voting-rights advocates are increasingly alarmed that none of this will ever happen without reforming or ending the filibuster, which requires Biden to lean in to that cause.
If there is a way forward, it looks like this. Democrats produce a new set of proposals similar to Sen. Joe Manchin III’s (D-W.Va.) compromise, which expands voting access, curbs extreme gerrymanders and restores federal oversight on voting-rules changes, along with mandating a less onerous version of national voter ID.
Democrats could add to that measures to combat election subversion. These might include avenues for local election officials to contest their illicit removal and other protections for election workers against harassment or intimidation.
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They could also include new reforms to the election certification process: Democratic lawyer Marc Elias suggests Congress could create a new standardized process for states to follow, making it harder for GOP legislatures to corrupt certification.
Another possibility would be to propose revisions to the Electoral Count Act. There are various ways to make it harder for a future GOP-controlled Congress to count rogue electors sent by GOP legislators in defiance of their state’s popular vote.
It’s the filibuster, stupid
Once such a voter suppression-and-election subversion package has the backing of 50 Democratic senators, it should get a vote. When Republicans filibuster it, Biden would then have to go to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and suggest it’s time to consider revising the filibuster to get this done, and if that doesn’t work, suspending it.
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Yet Biden didn’t mention the filibuster in his speech.
Merkley tells me, however, that this needn’t preclude action. Merkley notes that by instructing Congress to get this done with great urgency, Biden is in effect telling the Senate Democratic caucus that it must find a way no matter what.
“Having the president say you’ve got to get the job done, which is what he did in this speech,” Merkley said, “is exactly the right message.”
As a result of Biden’s directive, Merkley continued, “Fifty Democratic senators are going to have to get into a room, and figure out which path, but we’ve got to get it done.”
The question is how hard those 50 senators will work to find that path, and how hard Biden will lean on senators if and when that becomes necessary. By elevating the threat with such alarm and investing it with such gravity, he has placed the bar high for himself, and has given us a standard to hold him to.
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