Martin W.G. King: Voting rights hard sell for Biden
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President Biden is celebrating a potential deal on his infrastructure bill. Unfortunately, Republican lawmakers on the bipartisan committee that came up with the compromise draft insisted on trashing the social measures needed by families and some essential environmental components. Nonetheless, Biden’s all-consuming work on the issue has produced a victory of which he can be proud.
Biden set four signature goals for the first months of his presidency, and three have been robustly achieved. They include the apparent deal on the infrastructure bill; his massive vaccination program, which turned the pandemic around; and enactment of the groundbreaking child tax credit, with direct payments to families starting in mid-July. The fourth goal, passage of a voting rights bill, the For the People Act, failed when Republicans in the Senate refused to allow debate.
Now Biden is faced with an even harder sell — a second iteration of the For the People Act, not written yet, or the John Lewis Act, named for the revered late civil rights leader and congressman, which is much more narrowly focused. Whether Biden decides to go with either piece of legislation or some third option, he needs to make voting rights an overriding public issue just as he did with infrastructure.
The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Georgia over its new Jim Crow-style barriers against minority voting that the Department of Justice believes it can prove are racially motivated. In any case, lawsuits will solve nothing quickly, as they can be overturned and reinstated by one court after another.
With the midterms just 15 months away, a nanosecond in politics, they are no substitute for legislative action, and Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris (whose portfolio includes voting rights) and Democrats at all levels of government need to make voting rights their single, urgent priority. They need to turn up the heat on Republicans by barnstorming the country the way they did for the infrastructure bill, even if it means skipping their summer recess.
Biden suggested as he exited his press conference on the infrastructure bill that he believed some of the voting measures being proposed or already enacted in the states were extraneous and that he would target only critical anti-voting legislation.
Stopping such legislation is critical, but so are the other measures that have been proposed to combat the Republican Party’s ongoing attempts to gag and bind democracy with such new laws as the one in Georgia that makes it a crime to provide prospective voters with water — despite lengthy waits in line that last year amounted to as much as nine hours.
The best option might be for Biden to adopt Sen. Joe Manchin’s voting rights proposal as his own, especially as voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams has already endorsed it. It does, however, include far more actions than Biden might like.
Democrats who don’t believe they need to double down should consider what happened last month in Florida. There, in the Sunshine State, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring that students and faculty members at public universities register their political beliefs — not their party affiliation — with the state government.
If we don’t watch out, we may find ourselves cruising down beautiful, safe superhighways, funded by the infrastructure bill, toward another brush with authoritarianism — or worse.
Martin W.G. King is an independent writer whose commentaries focus on contemporary American issues.