This Politico article suggests that the White House is deeply concerned about the vote subversion/suppression going on in the states and plans to try to exert pressure through various means to alert the public and avert disaster in 2022.
Okay … but, really?
In January, standing on the steps of the Capitol, President Joe Biden warned of “an attack on democracy.”
In April, standing inside the House chamber, Biden declared that the only way to restore the country’s soul was “to protect the sacred right to vote.”
And earlier this month, standing on what was once Black Wall Street where as many as 300 Black people were murdered in 1921 by a white mob in Tulsa, Okla., Biden said he’d “fight like heck” to “combat the new assault on the right to vote.”
The White House says it’s using every tool it has to draw attention to restrictive voting laws being passed in GOP-led states across the country, including potential legal challenges. Administration officials say Biden talks about attacks on voting access in all of his major speeches to send a signal not just to voters, but to those in power, that it’s a personal priority. And though the decision to give Vice President Kamala Harris the voting rights portfolio was interpreted as a sign that the White House viewed the issue as intractable, senior officials insist that giving her “convening power” actually demonstrated how seriously they’re taking it.
“It’s a broad strategy,” said Cedric Richmond, director of the White House Office of public engagement. “It’s all hands on deck, and we are willing to meet the challenge.”
This coming week, the Senate is expected to vote on their own sweeping set of voting and election reforms, after the House narrowly passed its version earlier this year. Despite the road blocks, the White House isn’t conceding legislative defeat. “Sometimes it’s not the most attractive process,” said Richmond. “It’s the process of crafting legislation, but we’re not waiting on it.”
To build momentum, the White House has turned to Harris. In the past month, the vice president traveled to South Carolina to hold a listening session with local voting rights advocates, and she met with Texas legislators Wednesday to elevate their efforts to beat back a state GOP law restricting voting. Republican legislatures in states across the country are proposing or instituting new barriers to mail voting and are targeting election administrators with criminal penalties in response to false conspiracies of a stolen election spread by former President Donald Trump.
In an effort to combat changes in Republican-led states, the White House has also looked for allies in the private sector.
“We’ve talked to business all over the place,” said Richmond. “We want companies to step up and talk about the importance of a meaningful right to vote.”
That’s nice. But I don’t know that it has a real chance of changing anything.
On TV this morning the pundits are saying that this plan is to try to get Republican voters to push their representatives. It couldn’t hurt but you’ll have to forgive me if I remain pessimistic about changing the minds of people who think that orange psycho was the greatest leader in world history and had the election stolen from him. These are not rational people.
Perhaps more pressure on the Democratic fools who want to preserve the filibuster for Mitch McConnell to further destroy democracy and ensure that his party can rig elections for the foreseeable future? Seems to me that might be the priority.