Senate Republicans lack a conscience. Senate Democrats appear to lack cojones.
There is one--precisely and only one--bill that should be at the top of the Senate Democrats' agenda. It is called S. 1, aka the For The People Act.¹
S. 1 is sweeping legislation that will clean up decades of bad and unfair electoral policies and practices, including racist gerrymandering and voter suppression. It will quash the neo-Jim Crow laws now pouring out of several state legislatures like so much sewage.
That is if the Democrats show some spine, some gumption, some moxie.
The Republicans are already gearing up to defeat the bill, which has yet to come to the Senate floor. When it does, you can be assured they will be armed with motions to delay, to gut, to filibuster it into the next decade.
The highest hurdle the Democrats have to clear is the filibuster. The practice with the funny name is the GOP's favorite weapon. It's a delaying tactic that allows a senator to hold the floor for as long as she can keep talking. (The subject doesn't have to be legislation. Some filibusterers have read from cookbooks.) This ersatz debate can only be stopped if 60 senators vote to end it.
Because it requires a super majority to close it, the filibuster allows the Republicans to build a wall blocking a floor vote on S. 1, which itself requires only a simple majority to pass.
The Democrats need to deny the Republicans an opportunity to filibuster it either by making an ad hoc change in the filibuster rules or by voting to do away with the filibuster altogether.
The filibuster is a Senate tradition that has neither constitutional nor legal standing. It was brought about unintentionally in the early 19th century.² Republicans will fight tooth and nail to keep it, as it has become an effective and often-used tool of theirs for blocking civil rights legislation
It is imperative that the Democrats mount a rapid and hard-hitting counterattack. A perennial problem with Democrats is they invariably try to play nice: to reach across the aisle, to seek bipartisan consensus, to get their opponents on board.
Have they learned nothing from the past four years? The Republicans care not a bit about fairness or about consensus. They want to kill the bill and crush the opposition. They want to move ever backward to a time when races were divided and anyone not white lived in a second-class world and was not allowed to vote. If some Republicans had their way that lower class would include women.
Democrats, in government and in the public, need to rise up. Leaders of Black organizations must get behind the Democrats and exhort them to action. We the people need to get busy flooding Senate e-mailboxes with polite but firm demands that they listen to their constituency and get that bill passed by any means necessary.
For those who think this is all hyperbole, allow me a simile: Let's say a person has a heart attack while undergoing plastic surgery. The surgeon can drop what he's doing and save the patient's life or continue the scheduled procedure and have a pretty corpse on the table. Is there really a choice?
Our right to vote, to elect our leaders in fair and free elections in which every eligible American participates, is the very emblem and definition of the United States of America.
If we lose it we lose everything. Congress might as well disband and go home. Without the freedom of universal suffrage America will lose its moral and ethical high ground and any respect it may have in the community of world governments.
We will make a beautiful corpse.
--- Diogenes, 27 May 2021
¹ From The Brennan Center For Justice, a guide to the act: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/annotated-guide-people-act-2021
² Here's a link to a very good and concise history of the filibuster: https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/the-history-of-the-filibuster/