[Every Democrat in Congress voted against the 14th and 15th
Amendments to the Constitution, which aimed to guarantee equal
protection of the law and voting rights for freed slaves. The
Lincoln-era Republican Party passed them anyhow.]
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WHAT MANCHIN AND SINEMA CAN LEARN FROM THE LINCOLN REPUBLICANS ON
VOTING RIGHTS  
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Ron Browstein
June 28, 2021
CNN
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_ Every Democrat in Congress voted against the 14th and 15th
Amendments to the Constitution, which aimed to guarantee equal
protection of the law and voting rights for freed slaves. The
Lincoln-era Republican Party passed them anyhow. _

, "14th Amendment" by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

 

By the standards Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have
set for federal action on voting rights
[[link removed]],
the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution -- two pillars of the
post-Civil War effort to ensure equality for all Americans -- would
never have become law.

Every Democrat in Congress at the time voted against both the 14th
Amendment, which sought to guarantee all Americans (including the
freed slaves) equal treatment under the law, and the 15th Amendment
(which attempted to ensure the freed slaves the right to vote). Yet,
despite that opposition, the Abraham Lincoln-era Republican Party
considered the amendments so critical to expunging the legacy of
slavery and creating a new national floor of civil rights for all
Americans that they muscled them through Congress with barely any
dissenting votes from their members in each chamber.

Today, by insisting on preserving the filibuster, Manchin, Sinema (and
perhaps some other less visible Democrats) are, in effect, declaring
that Washington should not act to protect voting rights against
the restrictive laws advancing across red states
[[link removed]] unless
10 Senate Republicans agree to do so. With that declaration, they are
fundamentally inverting the decision by the Lincoln-era GOP to
prioritize protecting minority rights in the country over ensuring
minority input in the Congress.

"If you had the same formula some are suggesting now -- 'We've got to
have a Republican or we can't put this fire out' -- you wouldn't have
had the 14th or 15th amendments if that had been operative back then,"
says Democratic Rep. John Sarbanes of Maryland, one of the lead
sponsors of the sweeping voting rights legislation that cleared the
House earlier this year but was blocked by a Republican Senate
filibuster
[[link removed]] last
week.

The starkly partisan confrontations about equality during the 1860s
stand as one of the two moments when the US grappled with these issues
on a sustained basis. The other came almost exactly a century later
during the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, which presented a
very different model for progress. The landmark Civil Rights Act of
1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed in a bipartisan manner, as
the leadership and ideological center of each party in Congress united
against a recalcitrant rump group of Southern segregationist
Democrats.

But, while no historical parallel is exact, many historians and legal
experts believe the "First Reconstruction" in the post-Civil War
period, when one party had to act alone to safeguard civil rights,
provides a much more relevant precedent for today's sharply divided
partisan and social dynamics than the bipartisanship of the "Second
Reconstruction" during the 1960s. Now, as during the 1860s, the real
choice may not be whether Congress acts to preserve voting rights on a
bipartisan or partisan basis, but rather whether Congress acts on a
one-party basis or not at all.

"The structure of our party politics now is more like the 19th century
than the 20th," says Richard Primus, a University of Michigan law
professor who has written on the 1860s and 1960s. "We are not going to
have a regionally based civil war, the way they did in the 1860s. But
it seems naive to expect that the way out of the present situation is
going to be with the significant bipartisan cooperation of leadership
in the two political parties. ... We can't even get the two political
parties to agree to investigate a violent assault on the Capitol
[[link removed]] building
itself."

The age of '4-party politics'

Though the second Reconstruction, during the 1960s, is much closer to
our day chronologically, it may actually be more distant than the
1860s from our era in its political dynamics.

On paper, Democrats held huge majorities in both the House and Senate
when they passed the historic Civil Rights Act 
[[link removed]]of
1964. After President Lyndon Johnson's landslide 1964 win, Democrats
had amassed even larger majorities when Congress approved the Voting
Rights Act 
[[link removed]]in
1965; at that point, they held slightly more than a 2-to-1 advantage
over the GOP in both chambers.

Yet those numbers were misleading, because those majorities were
swelled by a large contingent of very conservative Democrats from the
"solid South" of former Confederate states whose voters still refused
to elect Republicans a century after the Civil War.

Those deeply conservative and often openly racist Southern Democrats
-- led by figures such as Sens. Richard Russell of Georgia
[[link removed]] and James
Eastland of Mississippi 
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backed the national Democratic agenda on some economic and many
national security issues. But from President Franklin Roosevelt's
second term in the late 1930s through the mid-1960s, those Southern
Democrats frequently joined with the most conservative Republicans in
Congress to block initiatives from liberal Northern Democrats and the
more progressive wing of the GOP (which mostly represented states
along the East and West Coasts.) That blockade was most unyielding on
any issue relating to civil rights.

Scholars termed this the age of "four-party" politics in Congress
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as each party was split into two distinct factions. Anything that
Congress passed in those years -- what I called "the age of
bargaining" in my 2007 book, "The Second Civil War" -- required
intense negotiation not only within the parties but between them, too.
The civil rights measures of the 1960s were no exception. The Civil
Rights Act of 1964 passed only after months of painstaking talks among
Johnson, liberal Democratic Sen. Hubert Humphrey and GOP Senate leader
Everett Dirksen produced an agreement that persuaded enough Senate
Republicans to join with virtually every Northern Democrat to break
the epic filibuster against the legislation backed by Southern
Democrats and the most conservative Republicans. After the brutal
attack on the civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama,
[[link removed]] horrified
the nation, the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 with similar
dynamics, though with much less resistance overall, and the
segregationist Southern Democrats even more isolated in opposition.

So, while the civil rights advances of the 1960s drew support across
party lines, they did so in a political era when the parties
represented much more ideologically diverse coalitions -- of both
voters and elected officials -- than they do today. In that period,
when many conservative Americans still called themselves Democrats and
many liberals identified as Republicans, the center-left of both
parties often agreed with each other more than they did with the most
conservative wings of their own parties. Tellingly, 1964 Gallup
polling found significant splits in both parties over civil rights:
Roughly half or more of Republicans said they supported the 1964 law,
while about one-quarter to one-third of Democrats opposed it in polls
throughout the year, according to data provided by Gallup.

"Partisan conflict was not a full reflection of existential or
constitutional worldview in a way that we have come much closer to
today," says Primus. "And that meant it was possible to undertake some
major legal reforms that the leadership of both parties could buy in
to."

'The normal rules don't apply'

As Primus suggests, the contrast in public opinion today is striking.
The substantial share of Republican voters who backed civil rights
during the 1960s made it easier for Republicans in Congress to support
it, too. But today, polls show the vast majority of Republican voters,
influenced by former President Donald Trump's discredited claims of
fraud
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back the restrictive election laws approved in states such as Georgia
and Texas. In one recent Georgia poll
[[link removed]],
91% of Republicans said it was more important to tighten election
security, compared with just 5% who said the top priority should be
making it easier to vote. (Eighty percent of Democrats, by contrast,
said expanding access to voting was more important.)

The support for voting restrictions among the party's voters will make
it almost impossible for congressional Republicans in meaningful
numbers to support legislation reversing the new red state laws, says
Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, a center-left think tank,
and author of a recent study of Republican attitudes on the 2020
election
[[link removed]]. Like
other recent studies
[[link removed]],
Drutman's analysis of 2020 polling data found that the Republican
voters most suspicious of last November's results, and most open to
small-d anti-democratic sentiments, were those who express the most
unease about the cultural and demographic changes reshaping America.

Because so many GOP voters believe "Democrats are trying to transform
America into something unrecognizable," Drutman notes, those voters
have concluded that "the normal rules don't apply, and it's OK to do
whatever it takes" to obtain power. Few, if any, elected Republicans
will stand against a current that strong, he predicts, especially with
Trump encouraging it; even the handful of Republicans who have
denounced Trump's fraud claims, such as Rep. Liz Cheney
[[link removed]] of
Wyoming or Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger
[[link removed]],
have almost all praised the restrictive new state voting laws.

While today's sharp party-line conflict over voting and civil rights
departs from the dynamics during the 1960s, politicians from the 1860s
would have no trouble recognizing it. The Republican Party was formed
in the 1850s explicitly as a Northern coalition opposed to the spread
of slavery; the Democratic Party, not only in its dominant Southern
wing but also among its Northern members, resolutely opposed federal
action to restrict slavery in the years before the Civil War and then
fiercely fought the Republicans' efforts to ensure rights and economic
opportunities for the freed slaves after the war.

"The right of African American men to vote came to be ... one of the
definitions of what it meant to be a Republican," says Columbia
University historian Eric Foner, who is considered the foremost
student of the Reconstruction era. "If you didn't favor Black suffrage
there wasn't much room for you in the Republican Party. Democrats ...
were the White man's party -- they said that explicitly. Obviously,
they had to accept that slavery was over ... but they opposed Black
suffrage into the 1870s and made it a major issue."

A small minority of Democrats did support the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution, formally ending slavery, that the Senate approved in
1864 and the House in 1865. (All but two of the 16 House Democrats who
supported it were lame ducks who had been defeated in the GOP sweep of
the 1864 election, as Foner highlighted in his 2019 book on the
post-Civil War constitutional amendments, "The Second Founding.")

But after that, not a single Democrat in the House or Senate voted for
the 14th or 15th amendments. In fact, no Democrats in either chamber
voted for any of the principal civil rights and Reconstruction bills
that Republicans passed over the next decade, according to a
compilation of the partisan breakdown of the votes 
[[link removed]]recently
posted by Harvard University political scientist Daniel Ziblatt.
Although the amendments, in particular, and the other laws all
required intense negotiation and compromise between "radical"
Republicans, who wanted to thoroughly remake the South, and moderates
in the party, who preferred a more cautious path, in the end no more
than four Republicans voted against any of the key measures in the
Senate and no more than five in the House (until the two final major
bills in 1875).

'We don't care ... if they vote for it or not'

Foner and Primus agree that the stark partisan alignment of these
votes -- and the uniform opposition from Democrats -- did not
discourage the Republican majorities from acting.

"They weren't like Manchin
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They didn't give a damn if was bipartisan or not," said Foner. "They
just said, 'We are in control, we are the party of the Union, we are
the party of emancipation, the Democrats are the party of treason,
they are the party of secession ... of racism, and we don't care ...
if they vote for it or not.' It just reinforced their feeling that the
Democrats were out of touch and didn't respect the results of the
Civil War."

Cooperation from congressional Democrats, historians note, seemed
especially unlikely to the Lincoln-era Republicans because over time
many of the key measures -- such as the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and
1872 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 -- were passed specifically to
counter the actions of White Southern Democrats, who were mounting
violent attacks to prevent former slaves from voting or exercising
other rights.

Sean Wilentz, a leading historian of 19th-century American politics at
Princeton University, says Republicans in those years grasped
something that Manchin and Sinema refuse to acknowledge: Legislators
in Congress are highly unlikely to support federal action against what
their own party members are doing in the states.

"We are now in that kind of situation," Wilentz says. In opposing
federal action to override restrictive state voting laws, he argues,
"Republicans now are just as firm and unyielding as the Democrats were
back in those days" in resisting military intervention against White
racist violence across the South.

As historians have observed, even the radical Republicans of the era
were operating within the limits of their time. One reason the 15th
Amendment does not include a simple affirmation that all Americans (or
even just all men) have a right to vote -- which many scholars believe
was a critical missed opportunity -- is that some Western Republicans
feared enfranchising Chinese immigrants and some in the North worried
about enfranchising new arrivals from Europe, Foner notes. And as he
points out, Republicans backed voting rights for freed Southern blacks
not only because they believed it was right, but also because they
thought it the best way to prevent secessionists from regaining power
in the South -- and to expand the Republican Party beyond its Northern
base.

"It is idealism, it is politics, it is nationalism, it is all of the
above," he says.

But the GOP also repeatedly demonstrated that it was committed enough
to its civil rights agenda to employ aggressive tactics, and even
change legislative rules, to advance it. After Lincoln was
assassinated in 1865, his vice president, Andrew Johnson, a former
Democrat who sympathized with the South, succeeded him as president
and recognized White-dominated new governments across the former
Confederate states; the GOP majority in Congress simply refused to
seat their congressional representatives in the 1865 Congress that
passed the 14th Amendment. Then after those Johnson-installed Southern
governments uniformly refused to ratify the 14th Amendment, the
GOP-controlled Congress passed legislation -- overriding Johnson's
veto -- that required states to do so before they would be allowed
back into the union. In 1875, House Republicans even changed the
chamber's rules to end the ability of the Democratic minority, in
effect, to filibuster the final civil rights act of the first
Reconstruction era.

"They definitely played hardball," says Foner.

'Permanent minority rule'

To Primus, the experience in both the first and second Reconstruction
periods sends a common message that it's unrealistic for
Manchin, Sinema
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other Democrats hesitant about changing the filibuster to expect that
Congress can safeguard civil rights without igniting significant
partisan and social conflict.

"If you are someone who thinks that the reforms of the 1860s and 1960s
are good things, it's easy to look back at them as if they were
templates and say, 'All good people today agree those are good things
and those are the kind of things we should do,' without remembering
that those things were intensely controversial when they happened," he
says.

After the disputed presidential election of 1876, the Republican
willingness to defend the rights of freed slaves collapsed, and a
combination of conservative Supreme Court decisions and restrictive
voting laws that were copied from state to state through the South
disenfranchised almost all Black voters across the region by the early
20th century, while also imposing the system of state-sponsored
segregation that infused discrimination into every aspect of daily
life. (Barriers to voting like the poll tax and literacy test passed
from state to state across the South in those years the way limits on
early and mail voting are diffusing now.) Those were the pernicious
laws that Southern segregationists protected for decades in Congress,
until the bipartisan coalitions of the 1960s finally uprooted them in
the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts under Johnson.

While today's offensive against voting rights is often compared to the
racist actions of the Jim Crow South (President Joe Biden has called
the new laws "Jim Crow in the 21st century"
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Wilentz says it actually more closely echoes the behavior of the South
before the Civil War. Through the Jim Crow years, he notes, the
Southern Democrats' principal goal was defensive: to prevent the
federal government from acting against segregation within their
borders. They weren't trying to expand segregation to new states.

But in the years before the Civil War, the South's goal was offensive:
to use its influence over the Democratic Party (and its institutional
strength in the Senate and the Supreme Court
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not only to prevent federal action against slavery but also to force
its expansion into new states and territories, even though Southerners
recognized this was opposed by the Northern states that had become a
clear majority of the nation's population. Northerners at the time
derided these interlocked efforts as the machinations of "the Slave
Power."

Today's Republican efforts to restrict voting across red states,
Wilentz believes, are operating with a similar vision. These
constraints, he says, are intended not only to suppress Democratic
constituencies in those states, but by doing so, also to tip enough
states that Republicans can control Congress and the White House, even
if Democrats (who have won the popular vote in an unprecedented seven
of the past eight presidential elections) win more votes nationwide.

By passing these restrictions, red state Republicans are "not just
saying, 'We want to be left alone to do our own thing [or] if we want
to keep Black people down, we have every right to do it,' " Wilentz
says. "It's also by doing so that they assure themselves a national
majority. And it's minority rule. They [want to] achieve what the
Slave Power failed to do: permanent minority rule."

With those ominous stakes, Wilentz, like Primus, finds it inexplicable
that Manchin, Sinema and perhaps other Democrats, by defending the
filibuster, are effectively providing Senate Republicans a veto on
whether Congress responds to the offensive against voting rights that
their GOP colleagues are passing on an almost entirely party-line
basis in red states
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One reason anti-slavery forces consistently lost ground in the decade
before Lincoln's election in 1860, Wilentz observes, is that they
refused to acknowledge how much the Democratic Party, shaped by its
ruling Southern faction, had "radicalized" since Andrew Jackson's era
three decades earlier.

"There were people living in the past," he says.

Something similar may be happening now as Manchin and Sinema demand a
traditional process of pursuing consensus on voting rights with
Republicans who have shown themselves willing to radically curtail
those rights in their quest to regain majority power, with or without
support from a majority of voters.

_Ronald Brownstein is a CNN senior political analyst, regularly
appearing across the network's programming and special political
coverage. _

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