Tell President Biden and your Senators: Democracy Must Be Preserved – Pass Filibuster Reform for Voting Rights!

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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.

In red and swing states, Republicans are ramming through new, highly partisan voting restrictions clearly aimed at preventing Democrats—particularly voters of color—from casting ballots. They are also enacting laws that will make it easier for Republican office holders and officials to overturn election outcomes so that their candidates can take office regardless of the popular will. The Senate must pass new voting rights legislation immediately!

It is now clear that not a single Senate Republican will support voting rights legislation of any sort, and that they will use the filibuster to prevent the Democratic majority from passing new voter protection laws. While I support filibuster reform ideas such as “talking filibuster” and “41 votes to sustain” they will not be enough to enact a voting rights bill, because restricting Democratic voters is the essential element necessary for Republicans to regain and retain power in a nation where the majority oppose their anti-democratic, pro-fossil fuel, pro-Wall Street agenda.

For your senators: As my senator, I want you to carve out a filibuster exemption for voting rights bills.

For President Biden: As my president, I want you to publicly call for carving out a filibuster exemption for voting rights bills.

Background

Throughout 2021, we wrote Calls to Action politely asking our MoCs to protect basic voting rights as Republican legislators stripped them away piece by piece, state by state, under the pretext that the most corrupt racist president in US history was not properly voted out. While some Republican legislators initially expressed outrage at the domestic extremists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, they soon recanted. The Big Lie rationale for that violent attack has become the main tenet of Republican candidates for office, even though Trump’s legal team had lost more than 50 challenges to the 2020 election results by December 15, 2020.

After failing to prevent President Biden’s inauguration, Republicans in Congress next turned to undermining his agenda wherever they could, including refusing to vote for the American Rescue Plan, which has done so much for the US economy since its passage. In addition, Republican governors have gone as far as to shun advice from medical experts on COVID vaccinations, leaving their populations far more vulnerable to its variants and making public health a political issue.

Senator Manchin pretends his Republican friends still believe in democracy even though the failure of the Manchin-Toomey gun control bill in 2013, after Sandy Hook, should have cured him of that romanticism. Manchin was allowed to ignore a lot when he asked for time to draft the Freedom to Vote Act; Senate Republicans filibustered voting rights bills four times last year. Manchin 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 nationwide. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have chosen to remain silent or retire rather than endanger themselves or their families by voting with Democrats and incurring the fury of the previous president and his radical supporters.

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 grass-roots and local, but is being whipped up and augmented by professional propagandists.

We are glad Majority Leader Schumer has finally suggested creating a filibuster carve-out to protect our voting rights. While this 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, including the following:

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
Reforming campaign finance, 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 online 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

The Republican Party’s embrace and elevation of elected extremists, rather than demanding their resignation, is an acute danger to democracy. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to how bizarre, radical, and dangerous these developments are. Republicans no longer accept the legitimacy of their political opponents and delight in fantasizing about political violence. We are witnessing one of the nation’s two political parties not just rapidly abandoning, but actively assaulting the foundations of democratic political culture.