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September 28, 2021
By Pete Brown, Detroit Workers’ Voice
The movement against voter suppression has not gone away, but new restrictive laws are being enacted in some states. On the weekend of August 28-29, rallies and marches for voting rights were held in some 40 cities around the nation, with the largest one a march to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. This was held on the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and was called March On for Voting Rights. It was organized principally by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and some affiliated organizations such as NAACP. The march drew some thousands of participants and a number of celebrities and politicians. Some speakers at the rally sharply denounced Republican Party efforts to limit voter participation, especially among Black and brown people. Connections were made to other political issues, especially racism and police brutality. (1)
But the solution offered by the main speakers remained confined to pressuring Congress to pass the Democrats’ proposed federal legislation, the For The People Act and the John Lewis Act. The main problem with this strategy is that it’s going nowhere. In 1963 some Republicans supported the final version of the Voting Rights Act (after they had insisted on weakening its provisions), but nowadays the Republican Party is spearheading the voter suppression movement, and Republicans in Congress are uniformly opposed to the Democrats’ two bills. Since the bills do not concern budget matters, they cannot pass Congress as part of a budget reconciliation process and so must get at least 60 votes in the Senate to pass. This would require getting at least ten Republican Senators to vote for the bills, assuming all 50 Democratic Senators voted for them. But there’s almost no chance even a single Republican Senator will vote for either bill. (2)
On August 28 in Washington a smaller rally of one thousand which took a slightly more leftish stand than the main body gathered nearby. This was called the Make Good Trouble Rally (after the slogan made famous by John Lewis), and their difference with the main rally was their insistence that Democrats do away with the Senate filibuster. Minus the filibuster, Democrats would need only a simple majority of 51 votes in the Senate to pass their legislation, and with VP Kamala Harris voting, they could do that. But again, there’s little chance of that happening. At least two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have declared their opposition to doing away with the filibuster. So the Democrats’ proposed federal legislation appears to be a dead letter. It’s good for the issue to be raised on the national level, but there’s little chance that federal legislation will be passed.
Meanwhile the Republican campaign of restricting voter rights continues at the state level. Most Republican politicians still embrace the Trumpist lie of a stolen election. Their legislators have dutifully sponsored some 360 bills in 40 states to tighten election laws. This campaign is not a localized, hit-or-miss effort; it’s organized by the national Republican Party through a “Committee on Election Integrity” funded by millionaires to investigate state election laws and coordinate efforts to change them. The campaign is backed by other national organizations like the Heritage Foundation and ALEC (American Legislative Action Council). Republicans hold the majority in most state legislatures, and they use their positions to gerrymander the districts to remain supreme for decades to come. Obama did nothing to stop this juggernaut by use of the Voting Rights Act, and by now that law has been rendered almost useless.
A major problem with the resistance to voter suppression launched by
organizations like NAACP is its reliance on the big capitalists.
Democratic activists have tried to get the Republican campaign stopped
by getting corporate CEOs and influential capitalists to sign petitions
and statements of support for voting rights. But even when the big
capitalists sign such petitions, they are usually mealymouthed
statements of support for democracy in general and do not threaten any
real action. And when the Republican politicians push ahead with their
agenda, little or no action is taken. This “corporate campaign”
strategy has proved a flop in one state after another. First of all, it
failed in Georgia, where the legislature approved restrictions on voter
rights despite petitions from major corporations like Coca-Cola and
Delta Airlines. Major League Baseball did cancel their All-Star Game in
Atlanta, but this didn’t faze the legislature, which went ahead and
threatened reprisals against MLB or any corporation inclined to
pressure them. In Florida, the legislature threatened reprisals before
they had even passed the restrictive bill, and so corporations were
mostly quiet, and Governor Ron Desantis signed a restrictive bill
without corporate dissent.
The latest example of the flabbiness of corporate opposition is Texas, where the legislature wrote threats into their law. When they heard that corporations might oppose them, they added amendments that would punish any “entity” that speaks out against the bill becoming law. This was an outrageous attack on freedom of speech, but it was successful in muzzling the corporations. As a last-ditch attempt to stop the bill from being passed, Democratic legislators left the state, thus depriving the legislature of a quorum. While they were gone, the Republicans were stymied. The Democrats went to Washington to lobby for federal legislation. But after having paid their respects to Congress, the Democratic legislators returned to Texas and thus allowed the restrictive bill to be passed and signed into law by Governor Greg Abbot. Why did they return? The Democrats finally stumbled onto a tactic that worked, that stopped the Republican juggernaut. Then they threw it to the winds. (3)
This new Texas law is a blatant attack on Black and brown people who
live in concentrated urban areas. It prohibits local election clerks
from opening up extra drop boxes, extra hours for early voting, and
sending out absentee ballots to the masses. One provision even
prohibits anyone from encouraging other people to vote absentee –
another outrageous and unconstitutional provision. But so far at least
the Biden administration has done nothing about challenging the law in
court, and corporate leaders are quiet as church mice.
So the campaign of voter suppression continues despite the demonstrations against it. In Arizona the phony audit of election results continues, and some of the legislators involved are now traveling around the country, speaking at rallies, trying to whip up support and launch audits in other states. They are using the audit as a political platform, using it to raise funds as they stretch it out for months beyond its original schedule. (4) Republicans are not cowed by the Democrats’ corporate campaign, as they know big capitalists are precisely the ones funding their own activities. (5)
Opposition to the voter suppression campaign cannot be based on
simply relying on the corporate heads who regularly shovel money into
the pockets of both major parties’ politicians. Last year’s massive
anti-racist demonstrations showed the power of progressive popular
sentiment. There needs to be more, and larger, such manifestations in
order to hinder, much less stop, the voter suppression campaign.
(1) Christine Fernando, Matthew Brown, and Cady Stanton, “‘Freedom is a constant struggle’: Protesters march for voting rights on anniversary of March on Washington”, August 28, 2021, USA Today.
(2) Victoria Whitley-Berry, “Thousands March in D.C. For Voting Rights”, August 28, 2021, npr.
(3) Eva Rugth Moravec, “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signs law creating new voting restrictions as opponents sue”, September 7, 2021, The Washington Post.
(4) Michael Wines, “Arizona’s criticized election review is concluding. But the copycats are just getting started.”, September 23, 2021, The New York Times
(5) Sarah Mimms, “Arizona’s Election ‘Audit’ Isn’t Done, But Two Trump-Supporting Republicans Are just Declaring Victory For Him Anyway”, September 8, 2021, BuffFeed.News. []
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