All Hands On Deck!

Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter today, March 25, which begins: "There is only one story today."

And that story concerns the continued existence of democracy in the United States.

Tonight, Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia signed a 95-page law designed to suppress the vote in the state where voters chose two Democratic senators in 2020, making it possible for Democrats to enact their agenda. Among other things, the new law strips power from the Republican secretary of state who stood up to Trump’s demand that he change the 2020 voting results. The law also makes it a crime to give water or food to people waiting in line to vote.

There are currently more than 250 measures in 43 states designed to keep Republicans in power no matter how the people vote.

Ms. Richardson says there will be one question historians ask of this period: 

Did Americans defend their democracy or did they fall to oligarchy?

The way things stand today, it looks as if the continued existence of American democracy depends on the fate of the filibuster.

 Click here for Ms. Richardson's March 9 newsletter article, entitled "Filibustering for Beginners."

Here is another short explanation of the filibuster by Ms. Richardson at billmoyers.com, in an article entitled "What We're Inheriting Is So Much Worse Than We Could Have Imagined," about the fact that the Trump administration had literally no plan for distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines:

The filibuster is peculiar to the Senate, and is a procedure designed to draw out the session to prevent a vote on a measure. It is an old system, but it is not exactly hallowed: it was a bit of a mistake.

The Constitution provides for the Senate to pass most measures by a simple majority. It also permits each house of Congress to write its own rules. According to historian Brian Bixby, the House discovered early on that it needed a procedure to stop debate and get on with a vote. The Senate, a much smaller body, did not.

In the 1830s, senators in the minority discovered they could prevent votes on issues they disliked simply by talking the issue to death. In 1917, when both President Woodrow Wilson and the American people turned against the filibuster after senators used it to stop Wilson from preparing for war, the Senate reluctantly adopted a procedure to end a filibuster using a process called “cloture,” but that process is slow and it takes a majority of three-fifths of all members. Today, that is 60 votes.

From 1917 to 1964, senators filibustered primarily to stop civil rights legislation. The process was grueling: a senator had to talk for hours, as South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond did in 1957, when he spoke for 24 hours straight to stand against a civil rights act. But the need to speed up Senate business meant that in the 1960s and 1970s, senators settled on procedural filibusters that enabled an individual senator to kill a measure simply by declaring opposition, rather than through the old-fashioned system of all-night speeches. The Senate also declared some measures, such as budget resolutions, immune to filibusters. Effectively, this means that it takes 60 votes, rather than a simple majority, to get anything — other than absolutely imperative financial measures — done.

In 2013, frustrated by the Republicans’ filibustering of President Obama’s judicial nominees and picks for a number of officials in the Executive Branch, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain Executive Branch and judicial nominees. In 2017, when Democrats tried to filibuster the nomination of Supreme Court Judge Neil Gorsuch, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, as well.

The filibuster remains in place for legislation.

The Democrats have passed an act in the House called the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering, and keeps dark money out of elections -- if it were to be enacted, it would override attempts by rogue states -- such as Georgia, at the moment -- to subvert the electoral process and ensure continued Republican rule, no matter how the people vote. 

The Republicans in the Senate will vote to kill the bill. So with the filibuster intact, Republican states can follow Georgia's lead and enact laws that act blatantly to suppress the vote. The future of American democracy will be on the ballot in November 2022. Will the Democrats be able to pass a law ensuring that that election is a fair one? The outcome is uncertain.

Good luck, America.