The Atlantic: How Manchin and Sinema Completed a Conservative Vision

“The question for Republicans is: why not make voting easier for your voters and everyone else’s?”

“Do their explanations hold up under scrutiny?”@jayrosen_nyu urges the media to stop treating GOP restrictions on voting rights as beyond examination:https://t.co/VKYYVAYavZ

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 18, 2022

I don’t see it happening.

If Republicans do pass election integrity laws at the state level and the Supreme Court rubber stamps them, I don’t see them having much of an impact. Black people aren’t going to be disenfranchised. Voter turnout in the 1996 election was 49%. It was 62% in the 2020 election. More people voted in the last presidential election than at almost any point since the early 20th century.

The Atlantic:

“The decision by Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to block their fellow Democrats from passing new federal voting-rights legislation clears the path for years of tightening ballot restrictions in Republican-controlled states. It also marks a resounding triumph for Chief Justice John Roberts in his four-decade quest to roll back the federal government’s role in protecting voter rights. …

Those decisions have had an enormous practical impact on the rules for American elections. But many voting-rights advocates say that the rulings have been equally important in sending a signal to Republican-controlled states that the Supreme Court majority is unlikely to stand in their way if they impose new restrictions on voting or extreme partisan gerrymanders in congressional and state legislative districts. …

That prospect could leave red states a nearly unfettered opportunity throughout this decade to advance more restrictions on voter access. Last year, 19 states passed 34 laws making it more difficult to vote, according to the tabulations of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. For 2022,  Brennan reports, 152 restrictive bills are carrying over in 18 states, while new proposals to impose further restrictions or launch partisan reviews of the 2020 election are surfacing as well. In Georgia, where Republicans passed a sweeping bill last year imposing new restrictions, a prominent GOP state senator has already proposed eliminating all ballot drop boxes in the state. …

With crucial help from Manchin and Sinema, Roberts’s triumph now appears complete. And that could trigger a decade of struggle over access to the ballot, unmatched since the days of Jim Crow segregation.”

After a long decline in the 20th century under the yoke of the boring “mainstream,” I expect our politics to become even more polarized and heated. I think voter turnout is going back up toward the previous high of partisanship that was reached in the post-Civil War and Gilded Age era. PMCs used to dominate both parties until Trump came along and made politics more interesting to the masses.

This was the height of democracy in America when the most people participated and politics was a knife fight to the death. The parties used to have torch marches at night. Politics was about demonizing the other side. Democrats and Republicans fought over nothing for decades while oligarchs controlled everything. It was commonplace in this era for Republicans to “wave the bloody shirt.”

Ronald Brownstein sees a Republican revolution from below driving national policy.

CNN:

“(CNN) – Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country are approving a wave of new voting restrictions on virtually party-line votes that require only a simple majority to pass. The US Supreme Court has likewise decided the key voting rights rulings that helped trigger this surge of state legislation on a party-line, majority-vote basis over the past decade. …

Voting rights is the most dramatic example of how the axis of Republican-controlled state governments, the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court and filibusters mounted by Senate Republicans is limiting Democrats’ ability to set the national agenda, even as they hold unified control of the White House, House and Senate for the first time since 2010. The same combination threatens to roll back other civil rights and liberties, most prominently the nationwide right to abortion, which has prevailed since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but also including transgender rights and the First Amendment rights of public school teachers over the discussion of race in the classroom. …

Taken together, the offensive and defensive maneuvers by this axis amount to a revolution from below — a powerful attempt by Republican-controlled institutions to drive national policy even while Democrats hold the executive branch and Congress, the traditional levers of federal policy-making. By upholding the filibuster, Manchin and Sinema have effectively neutralized the most powerful tool Democrats have to push back: their capacity, through that unified control of the White House and Congress, to pass legislation setting new national standards in all the areas under siege from the Republican axis. …”

Maybe he has a point though.

After the Force Act of 1890 was filibustered to death in the Senate, the Republicans began to retreat from Reconstruction. Southern state legislatures were testing the waters and passing the first Jim Crow laws in the 1880s and 1890s in the backdrop of these high turnout elections. The Supreme Court slowly rolled back the 14th amendment before the Plessy decision of 1896. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was shot down in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. The axis of the Supreme Court, Democratic-controlled state governments and filibusters mounted by Senate Democrats killed Reconstruction.

It didn’t happen all at once though. It played out over the course of decades. We went from extremely high turnout elections and bitter polarization to a cooling off period and sectional reconciliation. This occurred during the Nadir of the Negro during which blacks disappeared from politics.

What do you think? Will future generations look back at the defeat of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2022 as a historical milestone like the defeat of the Force Act of 1890? Could we be on the cusp of a tidal wave of White reaction and voter suppression similar to the 1890s and 1900s?

Note: Populism stormed American politics in the 1890s too. The fever of negro worship broke in the Republican Party and multiracial democracy died in the darkness.