NASHVILLE, TN – By most accounts, President Joe Biden’s first hundred days in office far outshined Trump’s first hundred days.
“Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation, America is on the move again,” Biden told a joint session of Congress on April 28.
Biden talked about the American Rescue Plan, about 220 million delivered doses of COVID-19 vaccines, and he promoted his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan. He called it a blue-collar blueprint to build America. The President’s next hundred days will not be so easy.
He faces hurdles in Congress about immigration reform, taxes, labor rights, free college tuition, childcare and parental leave, not to mention challenges in foreign policy like restarting the SALT treaty on nuclear weapons with Russia and resuming talks with Iran over its nuclear program.
There are two bills that would assure Biden gets more time to pursue his agenda if Congress approves them. For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would set national standards for voting access in America and strengthen protections against racial discrimination at the ballot box.
“Both bills will improve voting opportunities for millions of eligible Americans in communities of color, people with disabilities, and those with limited English proficiency,” said John C Yang, the president and CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC).
Yang said more Asian Americans voted in the last election than ever before and that it was due to automatic voter registration and access to voting by mail. He said passing the two bills would allow Asian Americans to maximize their political power by improving access to the ballot.
If they don’t pass, there are hundreds of bills in 47 states either already passed or in the pipeline that will create barriers to voting for people of color, seniors, and young people. By suppressing the vote, Republicans hope to make gains in the midterm elections in 2022. If that happens, Biden will face more opposition to his agenda than it already has now.
“We want to repair the damage that’s been done it’s done to the most successful protection of our voting rights in history—and that is Section 5, “ said Hilary O. Shelton, director of NAACP’s Washington Bureau and senior vice president for Advocacy and Policy.
Shelton was referring to part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a 2013 Supreme Court decision called Shelby County v Holder. The Supremes decided that states with long histories of voter suppression didn’t need federal oversight of their elections anymore. As a result, Shelton said voters in mostly Southern states found it difficult to cast their ballots in the last election.
While record numbers of voters turned out in the 2020 election, Shelton said once-outlawed voter suppression tactics were resurrected to kept Blacks away from the ballot box. That’s why the two voting rights bills are really important.
“We want to make sure that it’s easier than ever before for eligible Americans to register and vote,” he said.
Shelton recalled seeing film footage during the Civil Rights era when sheriffs stopped people from getting to the polls to vote.
“As you look some of those 1960 shots of you’ll see the C.T. Vivians or the Joe Lowerys and so many others leading people to those registration sites, literally being beaten to the ground. We’ve become more sophisticated in our disenfranchisement. We want to make sure we stop that disenfranchisement,” Shelton said.
“Latinos and the growth of the Latino vote has contributed significantly to a shift in the politics in a number of states,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
In California, Latinos make up one quarter of registered voters. Once purple or even red states like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado now each have two senators from the Democratic Party. Latinos are now 40% of the population in Texas and it has gained two more seats in the House of Representatives.
“If Texas flips, like these other states have flipped, the whole calculus of presidential elections will change permanently. That is the threat perceive by certain political forces that are behind efforts to suppress voting by everyone but particularly in communities of color and particularly the Latino community,” Saenz said.
“Voting rights in America are under attack like they haven’t been since the Jim Crow Era,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. The center has been tracking voter suppression for over a decade.
“The push to restrict access to voting in state legislatures is unprecedented in terms of both volume and intensity. As of a month ago, there were more than 360 bills to roll back voting rights pending in 47 states,” Weiser said.
Weiser said the sheer number of bills is a dramatic increase over any previous year and that they have been moving “aggressively” in many states.
She said seven states have passed voter suppression bills into law and more are being considered in Arizona, Michigan, Texas, New Hampshire and about a dozen other states.
“They all have the potential to dramatically reduce voting access especially for voters of color….the goal of these measures is to subtract voters from the electorate,” Weiser said.
The two voting rights bills would reverse the trend towards undemocratic voting laws everywhere. The For the People Act would require states to offer no excuse absentee voting and require states to open the polls to early voting on 14 days consecutive days. It would set national standards for voting access and prevent legislatures from manipulating them in the future.
The act would curb the role of big money in politics and enact a system of voluntary matching funds to increase the diversity of candidates running for office. It would set standards of ethical conduct for judges and elected officials.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would require any jurisdiction with a history of discrimination or any jurisdiction with significant minority populations, to get federal clearance for changes to their election laws and practices. In other words, the act would re-enact Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to prevent future voting laws from becoming discriminatory.
“These are the two key piece of federal legislation that taken together have all the key reforms that we need to protect voting rights and strengthen democracy in America,” Weiser said.
We are in a perilous moment in American history. The President is trying to unify the country around the largest federal intervention since the New Deal. Republicans call it just more tax and spending from the Democrats but Biden’s vision is much more than that.
He is shuffling the deck to reign in Wall St and remake an America where average people can prosper and live decent lives. He plans to tax the rich and invest in American industry and ingenuity. It is an extremely ambitious plan with plenty of critics on both sides of the aisle.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have launched a stealth war against voting rights and it’s a serious threat to American democracy. They are planning on bringing back Trump or someone like him. The two voting rights bills would keep that from happening.
This story was brought to you by the Blue Cross Foundation of California and Ethnic Media Services.
