Joe Biden Is All Out Of Ideas For How To Protect Voting Rights
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Republicans spent 2021 waging an all-out assault on American democracy, passing a wave of new voting restrictions and incessantly spreading conspiracy theories that have undermined faith in the country’s elections. On Tuesday night, President Joe Biden devoted less than a minute of his State of the Union address to detail Democratic plans to counter the GOP offensive.
The sole mention of Republican efforts to restrict voting rights came more than halfway into his 65-minute address, and Biden offered nothing more than another meager call for the Senate to pass legislation that it already effectively killed in January.
“The most fundamental right in America is the right to vote ― and to have it counted. And it’s under assault,” Biden said. “In state after state, new laws have been passed, not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert entire elections. We cannot let this happen.”
“Tonight,” he continued, “I call on the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And while you’re at it, pass the Disclose Act so Americans can know who is funding our elections.”
As on other issues, including abortion, Biden’s nod toward voting rights felt almost obligatory, resigned and meant to stave off criticism from progressive activists, civil rights leaders and Democratic state legislators ― many of whom spent the last year demanding moreurgencyfrom the White House – that he avoided the topic entirely.
It suggested that the president and Democratic leaders in Washington are out of ideas for how to respond to the GOP’s anti-democratic onslaught in the courts and in the states, not just with new federal laws but with forceful rhetorical defenses of the voters Republicans have targeted and the democracy they have put in peril.
And it painted a grim picture of where the fight to protect voting rights and bolster American democracy may go from here.
Senate Democrats’ inability to pass major federal voting rights bills had already signaled to Republicans that there would be no legislative response from Washington. Biden’s glossing over the issue Tuesday may have sent an even clearer message to the GOP: That the nation’s top Democrat is unlikely to go to the mat to defend its suddenly fragile democracy, even as Republicans intensify their efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election and set the stage to undermine future contests.
Biden didn’t make a single mention of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot. His meager defense of basic voting protections, meanwhile, was all the more striking because it came on the same day as primary elections in Texas, a state in which Republicans passed one of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws last year. Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Texas election officials reported that substantial numbers of ballots had been rejected thanks to newly restrictive requirements on absentee voting: In Texas’ largest and most diverse counties, roughly 30% of absentee ballots were rejected before Tuesday’s primary vote ― an increase from just 1% two years ago, The New York Times reported. Officials in Dallas and Harris counties, the state’s two most populous, rejected more than 8,600 ballots thanks to the new law, a larger number than were rejected across the entire state in 2020.
The Texas primary, many voting rights advocates fear, is merely a glimpse of what’s to come across the country later this year, as voters in Georgia, Arizona and other key swing states attempt to navigate a bevy of new laws that make it harder to cast ballots, especially for Black, brown, Native American and other voters that GOP laws have specifically targeted.
Nationwide, Republican-controlled state legislatures passed 34 new laws to restrict voting access in 19 different states. GOP legislatures in Texas and elsewhere also heavily gerrymandered congressional and state legislative maps in a way that may render midterm elections to decide control of Congress and state legislative majorities less competitive than they’ve been at any point in recent history.
The GOP’s assault continues to advance: Republican lawmakers have so far introduced or carried over more than 250 bills that aim to further restrict voting rights. Republicans in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and other states have also continued to try to undermine faith in elections and basic democracy, through conspiratorial “audits” of the sort Arizona Republicans conducted last year and other measures that seek to overturn or delegitimize former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss. GOP lawmakers in various states have introduced bills that would give legislatures the power to ignore the will of voters and hand electors to their own preferred presidential candidate, an idea that could in theory receive the blessing of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Republican legislatures have already expanded their partisan powers over elections by limiting the power of local officials to administer and conduct contests.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, meanwhile, further limited the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in February, using yet another ruling to effectively gut a law that has played a vital role in protecting the voting rights and political representation of Black Americans and other racial or ethnic minorities for more than a half-century. And as the 2022 midterm election cycle kicks off, Republican candidates who have peddled lies and conspiracies about the 2020 election have lined up to seek secretary of state positions and other key roles that would give GOP election skeptics major powers over how elections are run, how votes are counted and how results are certified.
The two voting bills Biden mentioned Tuesday ― the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act ― would have countered the GOP onslaught with federal voting standards and other election reforms meant to bolster basic democracy. But they failed thanks to unified GOP opposition and obstinacy from Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), who refused to join the rest of their party to overhaul Senate filibuster rules and allow the legislation to pass with a simple majority.
Both bills are dead in the water, and nothing Biden might have said or done Tuesday night could have altered the realities of Senate math. Still, by making a cursory nod toward those bills instead of outlining a novel strategy going forward or delivering a robust and clear statement about the GOP’s assault on voting rights, Biden once again relinquished the main power the State of the Union offers him: The ability to use the presidential bully pulpit to make the case to Americans, and to his own voters, that the country’s democracy is under threat, and that the Republican Party is responsible.
Trump and his GOP allies have not just attacked that democracy with new laws. They have also relentlessly targeted it rhetorically, spreading conspiracy theories about widespread voting fraud and stolen elections and feeding the belief among conservative voters that any election won by a Democrat is inherently suspicious and illegitimate. As a result, majorities or near-majorities of Republican voters, polls have shown, believe that American elections are marred by voter fraud (they aren’t), that Biden was elected illegitimately (he wasn’t), that American elections can’t be trusted, that GOP efforts to overturn the 2020 election will work, and that it is Democrats who pose an existential threat to American democracy.
Democrats have succeeded in passing expansive voting laws in nearly every state they control, and the Department of Justice and voting rights groups have launched legal blitzes on restrictive Republican laws nationwide. But the party has broadly failed to convince many independent voters that the GOP is waging war on basic democratic institutions, the right to vote, and the very idea of free and fair elections.
Experts on democracy widely regard the Republican Party as an authoritarian, anti-democratic political movement that has only further radicalized since Trump left office, as it has institutionalized the aims of the Capitol riot into law and policy across the country. But independent voters are equally likelyto see Democrats as a threat to democracy as they are to label Republicans as such, polls have found. Once Republican voters are factored in, Americans overall are slightly more likely to view Democrats as the biggest current risk to democracy.
That’s yet another worrisome sign for Democrats and Biden ahead of a midterm election cycle that will already be difficult for the incumbent party, and that will inherently advantage a GOP that is hoping for a total takeover of swing-state election offices and the machinery of the country’s contests ahead of the 2024 presidential race, in which Trump is planning to run.
Democratic voters still want federal action on voting rights, according to a January survey conducted by Navigator Research, a progressive polling firm. And in focus groups Navigator held during Tuesday’s address, the voting rights portion of the speech scored high marks among Democrats and independents.
“Biden has an opportunity and a responsibility to position protecting voting rights as a fundamentally American issue, and even if he can’t get Republicans on board, our polling shows that Democrats want to see Biden do everything in his power to pass voting rights legislation,” said Bryan Bennett, an adviser to Navigator Research.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Biden and Democrats have adopted a new strategy for advancing voting legislation and countering the GOP’s efforts ― or if they have decided their push is stalled and moved on completely to other priorities. It’s possible Biden has made the calculation that there’s no plausible path forward for major voting rights legislation, and that focusing heavily on the issue isn’t a political winner in the current climate, especially as part of a broader midterm strategy that seems focused on bolstering the party’s moderate credentials. His line on voting rights, Bennett said, “was one of the most polarizing moments of his address” ― a sharp break in a speech that largely focused on unity over partisanship.
But that may be an even more troubling sign for the voters the GOP has targeted, and the nation’s democracy itself: It’s increasingly difficult to see a path out of the country’s current democratic crisis if one party is fully committed to dismantling democracy, and the leader of the other can barely muster a response.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
