Dems Must Abandon Filibuster Now Or Face GOP National Domination

After Trump’s “election fraud” theme percolated its way through the consciousness of the Republican base, like clockwork, GOP-dominated state legislatures began introducing bill after ALEC-ghostwritten bill designed to “correct” problems that never existed in the first place. Suddenly, restricting early voting and mail-in voting, eliminating ballot drop boxes, imposing new identification requirements, reducing voting hours and locations (all in heavily Democratic-leaning areas), became priority number one for the GOP, an imperative they would sell over and over by referring back to Trump’s Big Lie.

As reported by Ronald Brownstein, writing for The Atlantic:

In its latest tally, the Brennan Center counts 253 separate voter-suppression proposals pending in 43 states. That’s significantly more than the number of bills it tracked after the 2010 election—180 bills, in 41 states—when significant GOP gains in the states triggered a similar wave of laws.

But there is a fundamental difference between now and 2010: The Supreme Court, now governed by a rabid 6-3 conservative majority (including, yes, John Roberts, the lead author of the 2013 decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act) is not merely likely—but certain—to uphold nearly any state-imposed restrictions that make their way to that “august” body. So all these new restrictions will not simply fade away in states like Georgia, Texas, Iowa, and Arizona; most will become the governing law in those states, and many more.

As a result, what Brownstein aptly characterizes as “the greatest assault on Americans’ right to vote since the Jim Crow era’s barriers to the ballot” threatens to tip the balance of American elections in the GOP’s favor, for well into the foreseeable future. That, coupled with partisan gerrymandering rendering an even larger majority of Americans essentially subject to the governance of a smaller Republican minority, presents an existential threat unlike any that Democrats—or the country, for that matter—have ever faced.

If those warped, distorted metrics intentionally designed to suppress Democratic turnout are ever imposed on all states at the national level—by a Republican president and a Republican-dominated Congress—it is highly unlikely that Democrats will ever hold power in this nation again.

As Brownstein observes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that future Americans could view the resolution of this struggle as a turning point in the history of U.S. democracy. The outcome could not only shape the balance of power between the parties, but determine whether that democracy grows more inclusive or exclusionary.

This is no “imaginary” scenario—it is, in fact, the most logical, likely outcome, unless the Democratic Party uses this brief, evanescent and flickering window of opportunity to stop the GOP’s ruthless juggernaut—by passing the election reform bill known as H.R. 1. The legislation would halt or reverse these GOP-inspired efforts by establishing automatic voter registration, ensuring a uniform early voting period and the provision of no-excuse absentee ballots, and ending partisan gerrymandering by requiring independent review of redistricting decisions.

Read more at Daily Kos.

Reprinted with permission of Daily Kos and authored by Dartagnan