People For Member,
Yesterday, President Biden – while acknowledging the severity of the Far Right's Jim Crow-esque attacks on voting and the dire need for voting rights protection bills – said the result of the Senate ending the filibuster to get these measures through would be that nothing gets done.
He’s wrong about that.
The only way to get a whole range of things done for the American people – things that Americans are depending on and that we voted for – is to take away the Far Right’s ability to hold our issue agenda hostage with the filibuster.
The president is right that Republicans would love to make a spectacle of debating filibuster reform and use it as an excuse to ignore other pressing priorities, like the For the People Act, that we need to save our democracy. But his acknowledgement of that should also serve as a reminder that Republicans, as a party, are NOT operating in good faith here, and that's part of their political strategy.
There doesn't need to be a drawn-out public debate in the Senate about ending the filibuster if every Democrat – including President Biden, Sens. Manchin and Sinema, and any other Democatic senators still squeamish about ending the filbuster – simply agree among themselves that it's time to end it. They can do away with it with a quick round of votes and then immediately move on to passing the For the People Act, infrastructure spending, and a host of other important bills that would benefit the American people and have already been passed by the House – the bills that, for now, remain stuck in Mitch McConnell's legislative graveyard due to the filibuster.
So what do WE do?
➡ We ramp up pressure on the White House – starting right now.
➡ We hold the Biden administration accountable to its forceful rhetoric about our democracy and the right to vote and make sure the president is willing to put pressure on senators and go to bat just as hard for voting rights as for his infrastructure bill.
➡ And we keep the pressure on Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to acknowledge that today's GOP has no interest in bipartisan solutions and to move ahead with the votes they have in their own party to save our democracy.
Despite Biden's statements – and statements by Sens. Manchin and Sinema asserting their opposition to ending the filibuster – we're still very much in this.
Each one of these elected officials has changed their mind in the past when public pressure became too great or counter arguments could no longer pass the laugh test (like the arguments against ending the filibuster).
Where will Biden's agenda be if the Far Right uses gerrymandering and voter suppression to take control of Congress in 2022?
The president seems to think that Democrats will be able to ride the popularity of his administration’s successes to out-organize the Right, and overcome intense right-wing voter suppression and other election-stealing tactics. But that’s a risk we cannot afford to take. If democracy as we know it dies, people are denied their right to vote, and elections are no longer awarded to the candidates who receive the most votes, then none of that even matters!
You know it. We know it. Republicans sure as hell know it.
Now we just need to make sure that the key Democrats we need to advance democracy legislation have no refuge in the phony arguments against ending the filibuster.
We know our targets and we know the work we need to do. But we can't do it without you.
Thanks for everything you do. We're in still in this, but only as long as we keep up the fight!
-- Ben Jealous, President
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