On the first anniversary of the most infamous day in modern American history, an urgent political struggle suffers from the short spectrum of voter attention. It’s a fight on behalf of all Democrats with a small “d” — not those affiliated with President Joe Biden’s party, but those who believe in the sanctity of the popular vote.
More than half a century after the historic passage of the Voting Rights Act, in the Lyndon Johnson administration, the United States stands out among the democracies developed by an archaic electoral system, dependent on the political winds of each of the 50 states and marked by the racial wound. .
As soon as the scare of the failed coup attempt to invade the Capitol had passed, the Republican-controlled state legislatures launched with greed into the project to make it difficult to vote.
The obvious explanation does not embarrass Abraham Lincoln’s party: the fate of the current right in the US is to shrink at the polls because its agenda no longer reflects the interests of the majority of the population. So, deciding who votes, how they vote, and how the vote is counted is today the fundamental battle of American constitutional democracy.
But it is also a struggle hampered by branding. When Senate leader Chuck Schumer dramatically announces that there is urgency to pass “right to vote” laws, he is referring to a multi-front struggle. Theoretically, every American citizen over the age of 18 can register to vote. But the less white the American population becomes, the more the Republican Party creates obstacles for minorities to exercise their rights.
Schumer says that the holiday that commemorates Martin Luther King, on the 17th, is the limit to overthrow the maneuver known as filibuster, a legacy of racial segregation. The mechanism dictates that laws only go to a vote in the Senate if they have the support of 60 of the 100 senators, an increasingly rare supermajority in Washington.
To pass voting rights laws, Schumer would need more than convincing Republicans. Two of the 50 Democratic senators don’t want to hear about overthrowing the filibuster, and their votes — along with Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaker — are the only way to pass a slew of bills to stem the backlash seen in states in 2021.
Democrats want to pass laws protecting voting by mail, guarantee deadlines for early voting. Another priority is reversing a 2013 Supreme Court decision that took the federal government’s watchdog role over the holding of state and municipal elections — and which represents the biggest setback in voting rights since 1965.
Republicans have historically been more agile in marketing their retrograde agenda. The fight against legal abortion, which the majority of the population supports, is promoted by the party in the pocket of the firearms lobby as a “right to life.” The fight against unions is the fight for the “right to work”.
Democrats need to sharpen their communication to protect the popular vote before the right succeeds in making a new January 6th without breaking a single windowpane.
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