Tell Senator Feinstein: Preserving Democracy Is No Longer Bipartisan
Call BOTH of your Senators.
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Call Script
My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.
As a senior member of the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, you have seen your Republican colleagues endanger our national security and defy their oaths of office for over five years now, for purely partisan political interests. We are counting on your vote to reform the filibuster so that emergency voting-rights legislation can be enacted. We need you to plead with Manchin, Sinema and the few Republicans who may retain a shred of patriotism to vote to protect our voting rights and begin to restore our international standing as a respected democracy. If Democrats fail to enact new voting-rights protection now, Republicans will double-down and pass even more anti-democratic voter-suppression laws in states that they control.
Background
Bipartisanship sounds lovely in the abstract. President Biden used the term a lot during his campaign, intending to heal the divisions in this country. Some Democrats in Congress use that term often too, thinking it will help them with voters in their more conservative states. But we rarely hear that word from their Republican “friends across the aisle.”
January 6, 2021, brought about one week of old-fashioned solidarity from some Republican legislators concerned about our democracy. But let’s not forget that on that very same day, January 6, 2021, 179 Republican House members and 7 Republican senators refused to certify the election results.
During the current and previous Democratic administrations, Republican priorities have been partisan-gain rather than serving their constituents or preserving democracy.. "One-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration," McConnell said on May 5, 2021, and in an interview with the National Journal on October 20, 2010, he said, “ The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Republican reckless disregard for bipartisanship has been particularly chilling in their deliberate defiance of public health measures that protect the whole country against a rapidly mutating virus just to win political points. Senate Republicans also gave Biden’s American Rescue Plan zero votes.
On August 26, 2021, all House Republicans voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA) which restores the original intent of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), including twenty-four sitting members who had voted to renew the VRA in 2006. When the JLVRAA was introduced in the Senate, only one Republican voted to bring it to the floor for debate. That’s right: Republicans filibustered the JLVRAA and filibustered voting rights legislation three more times in the Senate in 2021. Filibustering is easy these days, because no debate is required: senators can email their intention to stop a bill from being debated at all.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, a founding member of the civil rights group Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), reminds us that some important milestones in the fight for equal voting rights were not bipartisan votes. ““I am, as you know, a Black person, descended of people who were given the vote by the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The15th Amendment was not a bipartisan vote. It was a single-party vote that gave Black people the right to vote.``
References
https://www.democracydocket.com/news/it-is-time-to-admit-that-democracy-is-a-partisan-issue/, 12/03/21, Marc E. Elias
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/11/republicans-once-supported-the-voting-rights-act-today-they-voted-against-its-restoration/, Ari Berman, 11/03/21
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/mcconnell-says-he-s-100-percent-focused-stopping-biden-s-n1266443, 5/5/21, NBC News
https://nypost.com/2022/01/10/james-clyburn-slams-sen-manchin-on-bipartisan-senate-changes/, 1/10/22, NY Post