House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dug down on the distinction between the For the People Act and the John Lewis Act in a letter to her House colleagues, though the message seems tailor-made for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).
Manchin drove a stake through the heart of much of the Democratic agenda in recent weeks, with an op-ed where he came out against H.R.1/S.1 and reaffirmed his refusal to reform the filibuster.
Instead, Manchin said he’d support the John Lewis Act, H.R.4, as if it was a narrower version of the Democrats’ sweeping democracy reform package.
In reality, and as Pelosi pressed, they are two fundamentally different pieces of legislation with different goals.
S.1 would cover such a range of reforms as automatically registering eligible citizens to vote, establishing bipartisan commissions to handle redistricting and ensuring that every state has mail and early in-person voting options.
The John Lewis Act was written in response to a 2013 Supreme Court case which gutted the Voting Rights Act by tossing out a formula used to determine if states had histories of racial voting discrimination and were required to get Justice Department approval before enacting new voting laws or redistricting. The Act would replace that void with an updated formula, as well as making it easier for the DOJ to send election observers and to block election law changes that violate people’s constitutional right to vote.
Manchin has expressed little about his policy objection to S.1 or preference for H.R.4: rather, he has expressed opposition to legislation that lacks Republican support. HR4 currently has the support of exactly one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), far short of the 10 needed to break the filibuster Manchin ensures remains in place.
Some have pushed for the John Lewis Act to replace S.1 as the framework for further democracy safeguards, though Pelosi has shut down that idea by emphasizing the months of work left to do on H.R.4, including congressional hearings to create a record that can be used to to fortify it against likely legal challenges.
“H.R. 1 protects us in the current elections and must pass now,” Pelosi wrote. “H.R. 4 is the foundation for future elections and must be passed in a way that is constitutionally ironclad. Any premature passage could be very damaging to its success.”
Currently, a House Judiciary subcommittee overseeing federal elections is compiling evidence of discriminatory voting practices to use in markup of the bill. Pelosi has said that the legislation probably won’t be ready until the fall.
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) still intends to bring S.1 to the floor this month where it will likely die a bipartisan death, thanks to Manchin. While the other 49 Democrats co-sponsor the legislation, it currently has no Republican support.
Yesterday I wondered why we couldn’t stop the push for the For the People Act and start working to pass the John Lewis bill. Now I know why we can’t.
So we’re back to the immovable Joe Manchin. sigh
What is it going to take? Lincoln had way less trouble getting the Constitution amended with the 13th.
Reminder that Joe Manchin was for it before he was against it.
Yeah. We ought to be able to hold legislators to that. If they co-sponsor a bill then by god it’s theirs and they have voted for it and they can’t start this cha cha with their vote.
We’re obviously going nowhere fast, so Schumer is correct to put the bills up for a vote and get it over with.
Ds will have to abandon the legislative model of government and simply focus on partisan electoral politics between now and 2022. Blame the GOP for destroying government, pass as many judges as possible with minimum consultation, do lots of investigations into 1/6 and the Trump years. The names Manchin and Sinema must never be uttered, since they will now be irrelevant, neither being up for election next year. Coons, the bipartisan squirrel, must be told to sit down and shut up. Focus everything on expanding the number of D senators in 2022 by two.
This being the only viable way forward, I think we need brand new congressional leadership, one that can be trusted to acknowledge and actually do something about the GOP destruction of our institutions and democracy. Schumer, Pelosi, etc come from a different era, and their experiences have been of decades of losing elections to the GOP. They can’t begin to conceive of what it would mean to do adversarial politics. We’ve seen that in their reaction to 1/6, which they have responded to with legislative performance art, as per usual. Time to move into the future and into battle. If not now, when?
More broadly,
OT