“Then they came for my voting rights,” Martin Niemöller might say in a 21st-century reworking of his famous quotation,
On this 56th commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” 1965 when Alabama state troopers beat and tear-gassed hundreds of peaceful civil rights protestors in Selma, President Joe Biden will sign an executive order to promote voting access in this new age of vote suppression. Biden’s Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill face an uphill — or perhaps up the Edmund Pettus Bridge — battle to pass H.R. 1, the “For the People Act,” a sweeping elections and voting reform act over unified Republican resistance and pushback from a few Democrats opposed to changing Senate filibuster rules.
Axios bullet-points a few of the order’s details:
- It calls for a revamp of Vote.gov, the government’s voting information website, within 200 days.
- The order directs the Department of Defense to make it easier for active-duty military and voters living abroad to cast their ballots.
- It calls for a review of voting practices and how they affect people with disabilities.
- It also creates a steering committee on Native American voting rights.
Biden’s order is timed to remind Americans of the struggles of Black Americans to secure voting rights over a half-century ago (New York Times):
The multipart order is aimed at using the far-flung reach of federal agencies to help people register to vote and to encourage Americans to go to the polls on Election Day. In a prepared speech for the Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast on Sunday, Mr. Biden will argue that such actions are still necessary despite the progress of the last half-century.
“The legacy of the march in Selma is that while nothing can stop a free people from exercising their most sacred power as citizens, there are those who will do everything they can to take that power away,” Mr. Biden will say, according to the prepared remarks.
“Every eligible voter should be able to vote and have it counted,” he plans to say. “If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let more people vote.”
Moses he is not, but Biden knows how to evoke him before a crowd still struggling to reach the promised land.
Jonathan Capehart recalls the violence of Sunday, March 7, 1965 (Washington Post):
The cracks of those clubs, the shrieking of those marchers were not just heard in the moment. They were heard nationwide later that night, when ABC interrupted its broadcast of “Judgment at Nuremberg” to show footage of the horror — a horror that proved pivotal in the civil rights movement.
A week later, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act without which “there would not be a Jimmy Carter, or a Bill Clinton, and I’m positive there would not be a Barack Obama as president of the United States of America,” the late Rep. John Lewis wrote.
Violence by police against Black people provoked street protests last summer from coast to coast, the largest ever seen here. Right-wing backlash against the browning of America has provoked wave after wave of legislation aimed at reversing the gains of the civil rights era.
Capehart adds:
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments involving voting restrictions in Arizona that could snuff out the Voting Rights Act entirely. Also last week, Georgia Republicans started moving legislation aimed at restricting access to the ballot in a number of ways, including leaving it up to each county whether to have any Sunday early voting. This would be a devastating blow to “Souls to the Polls,” the Sunday practice of African Americans casting their early voting ballots after church service. Such aggressive moves to thwart the vote are happening after President Biden became the first Democrat to win the state since 1992 and after Democrats won both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats.
Georgia is not alone in putting limits on the right to vote. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice notes, “As of February 19, 2021, state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states.“ With the “For the People Act,” Congress is stepping in to stop this.
In an evenly divided Senate, the prospects remain slim for passing H.R. 1 or H.R. 4, the “John Lewis Voting Rights Act,” for restoring the Justice Department’s preclearance authority gutted in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Let’s hope an already bloody struggle does not get any bloodier. But I have no hope the struggle will end soon.