President Biden, Push Senate Democrats to Reform the Filibuster and Pass Voting Rights Legislation
Use the White House web form to make your public comment to President Biden.
Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
President Biden,
Our democracy and our republic are at an existential crossroads. We urge you to use the power of your office to advocate for filibuster reform, so that Senate Democrats can pass S1 and/or other voting protection legislation. Republicans will not support any version of such legislation, yet passage is critical to ensure all eligible Americans can vote and the administration of elections remains a nonpartisan, fair process in every state.
You have expressed the hope that dedicated Democratic voters could out-organize these voter suppression laws, as we sometimes have in the past with previous suppression efforts, but surely you know that Republican voter-suppression tactics have been successful in tipping many past elections, including the 2000 and 2016 presidential races. And surely you know that the hundreds of 2021 voter suppression bills include criminal penalties for voter registration drives, and some even empower state legislatures to overrule the will of the electorate.
Background
The Big Lie—the claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump—continues to gain momentum, even though by December 8, 2020, the ex-president’s legal advocates had lost over fifty challenges to the election results in several states. And even though that Big Lie drove the ex-president’s supporters to perpetrate a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021.
The effort to propagate the Big Lie is not coming only from internet trolls like the Pillow Guy, disgraced lawyers like Rudy Giuliani, or Fox News hosts. It has been used by Republican-controlled legislatures across the US as a pretext to enact laws that will make it more difficult for people of color and poor people to vote and aim to place the administration of elections under partisan (Republican) control. This new voter suppression effort has attracted the attention and funding of well-established Republican dark money groups including the Heritage Foundation, Honest Elections Project led by Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, Freedom Works, the Bradley Foundation and others, as detailed in Jane Mayer’s recent exposé in The New Yorker, “ The Big Money Behind the Big Lie.”
All this is happening along with the release of new Census data that initiates a new round of redistricting, redrawing legislative districts. Republican-controlled legislatures have not been reluctant to engage in partisan gerrymandering (as they did in 2010), and are likely to do so again.
These well-funded Republican assaults on our voting rights, along with a new round of partisan gerrymandering that could rig House districts for the next decade, make this a five-alarm fire moment for our democracy. Now every day that passes without federal legislation—and addressing the filibuster—adds to the danger, which made it deeply disappointing that Senate Democrats left for recess without addressing the filibuster. A majority of Senators support legislation to protect voting rights and stop partisan gerrymandering, but the filibuster is standing in the way.
“Time is running out. Attacks on our democracy can’t be ‘out-organized.’ We need President Biden to jump into this fight and push Senate Democrats to pass voting rights legislation before it’s too late.” (https://www.fixoursenate.org/)