Tell your Senators: Bust the Filibuster for Equal Voting Rights
Call BOTH of your Senators.
Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
Senator Manchin was given the courtesy of rewriting John Lewis’s For the People Act to produce a bill he claimed Republicans would support, even though he knows they’ve spent decades suppressing the votes of people of color. The resulting Freedom to Vote Act is ready to go. We need you to protect the diverse democratic coalition of millions of Americans planning to vote in 2022, deal a blow to white supremacist terrorism, and fight back against the Republicans’ larger project of entrenching white reactionary rule. We need you to eliminate the filibuster and pass the Freedom to Vote Act.
Background
We’ve been writing courteous Calls to Action for months now, asking for the protection of our basic voting rights, as they are being stripped away from us piece by piece, state by state, by Republican legislatures using the rationale that the most corrupt racist president in U.S. history was not properly voted out by We The People. We’ve been doing our best to use courteous Congressional language in making these requests, but it is exhausting, given the grim realities our democracy is facing.
While some Republican legislators initially expressed outrage at the domestic extremists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, they soon recanted. Even after the president was impeached for the second time, this time for instigating an insurrection, Republican Senators would not remove him. After President Biden’s inauguration, Republicans in Congress turned to undermining his agenda wherever they could, including filibustering the For the People Act on June 15. It has been disturbing, after all that, to see any Democrats helping the party of sedition sympathizers by opposing President Biden’s positive, popular, transformational agenda.
Senator Manchin’s team wrote the Freedom to Vote Act after his assurance that he could produce a voting rights bill with provisions Republicans could support. He chose to overlook Republican legislatures’ decades of voter suppression. He also knew many Republican legislators have chosen to remain silent or retire rather than endanger themselves or their families by incurring the fury of the previous president and his radical supporters. He also ignored how some “friends across the aisle” have not only condoned the white supremacist terrorist attack on the legitimacy of President Biden’s election, but defended mobs disrupting public proceedings and threatening officials. All 50 Republican senators voted against the Freedom to Vote Act. Inspired by the “success” of the terrorist attack on January 6, Trumpist Republican mobs have extended their violent intimidation to school boards, public health officials, and healthcare workers. The fury is designed to seem authentic and local, but is being augmented by professional propagandists.
While eliminating the filibuster to protect our voting rights will elicit the typical howls of Republican legislators on national media, and online rage from white supremacist groups, it will be a strong step toward curbing racist violence by giving all Americans the chance to vote out the Big Liars and their anti-democratic supporters in 2022.
The Freedom to Vote Act includes strong measures to expand and protect national voting standards and election systems, such as:
Expanding opportunities to vote
Thwarting voter suppression, including expanded penalties for voter intimidation
Reforming redistricting with rules applicable to all maps created in the current cycle, including those that have already been enacted
Preventing election sabotage by protecting election officials, poll workers, ballots, and certification)
Modernizing voter registration
Campaign finance reform, including addressing “dark money” by requiring any entity that spends more than $10,000 in an election to disclose all of its major donors; extending campaign transparency requirements to internet ads; and requiring the major online platforms that sell ads to create searchable databases of past advertisements and their buyers in order to maximize transparency and minimize disinformation.
We are at a critical turning point, and as Georgetown University historian Thomas Zimmer explains, “Unless the system is fundamentally democratized, we’ll soon reach the point where it will become impossible to stop America’s slide into authoritarianism through elections.”
References
The Freedom to Vote Act , Brennan Center review of its provisions, 9/20/21
The groups aiding protests against masks, vaccines and Critical Race Theory, NPR, 10/26/21
Can America survive Trumpism?10/29/21, 80-minute conversation with Professor Thomas Zimmer, Georgetown University, historical perspective on the Right’s anti-democratic radicalization.
Oath Keepers in the State House: How a Militia Movement Took Root in the Republican Mainstream , ProPublica, 10/20/21
Fifth Republican Senator Announced He Will Not Seek Reelection, VOA News, 3/08/21