We March On for Voting Rights and Economic Justice
"We who believe in freedom cannot rest" -- Ella Baker.
The fight for justice, equality, and human dignity is not a sports event with a final buzzer determining the winner/loser. It's a long, multi-generational journey marked by a thousand milestones. On January 19, 2022, we were blocked from achieving an important milestone in a heartbreaking and infuriating defeat. Now we must learn from it and resume pushing ahead. The road ahead is filled with twists and turns, hills and valleys. Our journey continues.
In 1957, 1958, 1960, and 1962, the filibuster blocked substantive civil rights bills. In 1964 and 1965 the Civil Rights Movement forced them through. The 1966 bill was blocked, then much of it passed in 1968. But in all of those bills, the Movement was never able to pass the provisions against police-violence-racism. That fight continues to this day. For 80 years an anti-lynching law was introduced in the Senate and it was always blocked by filibuster or threat of filibuster. It has not passed to this day. But the Freedom Movement of the 1960s changed American culture so that racial lynching and terrorist violence were no longer socially sanctioned and legally ignored or condoned as tools of mass oppression.
This voting rights defeat was Republicans running their same old games at the expense of We the People – just as they did with President Obama. They let him partially rescue the US economy from the Bush crash to cloud public memory of Republican failures, then obstructed as much as they could of Obama’s agenda, using racism to fuel the opposition, and exploited disappointment at his inability to get more done to demoralize and discourage Democratic voters.
They couldn’t stop President Biden from executing his American Rescue Plan, and they knew it would obscure to some extent Trump’s great failures in Covid-19 management. Since they knew President Biden’s campaign promises were popular with a majority of voters, they vowed to obstruct the Build Back Better agenda: pass a raft of voting restrictions in Republican-led states; use “Critical Race Theory” (CRT, a technical legal theory taught in some law schools as the 2022 racism dog whistle, and seduce two Democratic senators with millions of dollars to thwart Biden’s economic and voting rights agenda. Meanwhile, they continue to resist President Biden’s effort to appoint federal judges who reflect America’s race and gender diversity.
We’ve seen this before: Republicans finance scorched-earth campaigns to keep Congress in gridlock, while Democrats invest far less in a 50-state strategy and run overly polite campaigns. Republicans use the gridlock they create to obstruct Democrats’ popular policies, then GOP operatives encourage Democrats’ discontent that their party “just can’t get anything done.” Meanwhile, conservative and Republican viewpoints continue to dominate our national media.
Let’s not fall for that again. Let’s follow in the footsteps of the Civil Rights Movement and keep fighting to strengthen the multiracial, pluralistic democracy we cherish. President Biden has brought us closer than we have been in decades to achieving definitive climate change legislation, support for the care economy, respect for labor unions, and tax fairness. The Democratic House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the For the People Act (with ethics reform in it), the Women’s Health Protection Act, and so much more that shows us what we can do if we fight on for more Democratic seats in Congress.
When our democracy is under attack, what do we do?
STAND UP! FIGHT BACK!
Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts will be crucial and ISF’s Events page will feature many ways you can participate, from groups like these:
Indivisible National, our parent organization, can link up your friends and family with groups like ours nationwide to participate in electoral and GOTV work.
Poor People’s Campaign: determined to register millions of poor and low wealth voters nationwide; we discussed their carrying MLK’s message into the 21st century in a recent blog.
Swing Left San Francisco: mobilizes Bay Area activists to support Democratic campaigns in swing districts through canvassing, phone banking, and other voter outreach methods. Our focus is primarily on the California Central Valley and Arizona
Sister District: volunteers work with campaigns to help with fundraising, phonebanking, canvassing, texting, and writing postcards and letters.
Field Team 6: focuses on voter registration. They've helped register almost 3 million swing state Democrats, and are ready to do it again
Center for Common Ground: A non-partisan voting rights organization founded by people of color, founded to educate and empower under-represented voters in voter suppression states to engage in elections and advocate for their right to vote.
Legal teams will continue fighting all the voting restrictions Republican legislatures have imposed.
Democracy Docket,founded in 2020 by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias,delivers expert opinion and commentary on voting and offers detailed information about important litigation and policy that will shape our elections and democratic institutions for years to come.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, founded in 1950, engages in legislative advocacy. It has coordinated national lobbying efforts on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.
NAACP Legal Defense Fund is America’s premier legal organization fighting for racial justice. Through litigation, advocacy, and public education, LDF seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, and achieve racial justice in a society that fulfills the promise of equality for all Americans. LDF also defends the gains and protections won over the past 80 years of civil rights struggle and works to improve the quality and diversity of judicial and executive appointments.
ACLU Voting Rights Project was established in 1965 and has litigated over 300 voting rights cases, aggressively and successfully challenging efforts that dilute minority voting strength or obstruct the ability of minority communities to elect candidates of their choice.
Dept. of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division– Read about Biden’s DOJ’s ongoing actions and excellent appointments to its leadership to preserve and extend our voting rights nationwide, led by Assistant AG Kristen Clarke, a lifelong civil-rights lawyer. Associate AG Vanita Gupta, former president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, supervises multiple litigating divisions within the DOJ, including the Civil Division, Civil Rights Division, Antitrust Division, Tax Division, and Environmental and Natural Resources Division.
Corporate Media will continue to downplay President Biden’s successes, and in an era when the loudest GOP voices are amplified, these media analysts help us understand their habits and distortions.
Pressrun.media helps make sense of today's media landscape. It’s run by Eric Boehlert, a veteran media critic who’s been monitoring right-wing misinformation for years, first as a staff writer for Salon, then ten years as a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and most recently as a media critic at Daily Kos. He is the author of Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over For Bush, and Bloggers on the Bus: How The Internet Changed Politics and the Press.
Press Watch, founded in October 2019 by longtime journalist and media critic Dan Froomkin, is an independent nonprofit organization devoted to encouraging political journalists to live up to the highest standards of their profession.