The House is expected to vote Tuesday to restore federal oversight of the state’s election laws as Democrats begin an effort to strengthen the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act amid a national battle over access to the ballot box.
Democrats see the legislation, named after the late Georgia civil rights icon John Lewis, pivotal in their fight against voting restrictions in Republican-led states. It would overturn two Supreme Court rulings that disrupted the statute, reinvigorating the Justice Department to allow some discriminatory electoral amendments to take effect. It would also make it easier for voters to raise legal objections to voting rules that are already on the books.
Despite pressing deadlines for next year’s midterm elections, Democrats were expected to pass the measure along party lines during a rare session in August, just days after the bill was introduced. But stiff Republican opposition awaits in the Senate, where a likely filibuster threatens to sink the bill before it can reach President Biden’s desk.
That outcome will begin to be revealed this summer, as Democrats on Capitol Hill attempt to use their party’s control of Congress and the White House to accelerate election changes — only to be blocked by their Republican counterparts. In the meantime, more than a dozen GOP-led states have already enacted more than 30 laws that make it harder to cast votes.
Frustration with that dynamic has led to increasingly desperate calls from progressives and many mainstream Democrats to invoke the so-called nuclear option and eliminate the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. This would allow Democrats to move unilaterally without Republican backing, but any rule change would require the support of all 50 Democrats in the chamber, and key moderates oppose it.
During the debate ahead of Tuesday’s vote, proponents of the bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, drafted it as an essential addition to Democrats’ other major electoral law, the For the People Act. Even more ambitious, that legislation would set new national standards that would make voting easier, end partisan gerrymandering and fight black money.
“The history of the struggle for voting rights in America is long and painful,” said North Carolina Democrat Representative Deborah Ross. “It is up to us to meet the urgency of the moment, fulfill our constitutional responsibilities and pass this crucial piece of legislation.”
Lawmakers drafted the Voting Rights Act fix to respond directly to a few Supreme Court rulings in which a conservative majority invalidated or weakened key parts of the statute.
The first came in 2013, when the judges in the Shelby County v. Holder case repealed a provision requiring states and jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting practices to obtain federal government approval for any changes to their electoral rules.
The court specifically ruled that the formula used to determine which entities should be subject to such requirements was outdated, and said Congress would need to update it to be constitutional. The bill to be discussed Tuesday proposes an updated and expanded coverage plan.
The legislation also seeks to overturn a Supreme Court decision last month in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which targeted a separate section of the statute and made it more difficult to successfully challenge vote changes as discriminatory in court.
Republicans have enthusiastically supported extensions to the Voting Rights Act in the past. But since the court’s ruling in 2013, they have shown little inclination to revive the parts of the statute that have been scrapped, arguing that the kind of race-based discrimination the law was originally supposed to combat no longer exists. .
Instead of tackling a real problem, Minnesota Republican Representative Michelle Fischbach said Democrats were trying to give the federal government “unprecedented control” to roughly beat the states and enact rules that would favor their political candidates. .
“It allows the Attorney General to bully states and forces those states to seek federal approval before changing their own voting laws,” she said.
