Dear John,

On this day 56 years ago, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the 1965
Voting Rights Act into law, expanding the right to vote to tens of
millions of disenfranchised Americans and setting our country on a path
toward establishing its first true multiracial democracy.

That momentous win for democracy and voting rights happened because people
protested, sacrificed, and put their lives on the line to engage the
conscience of the nation, and because President Johnson was willing to use
the full force of his office to pass federal voting rights legislation.

Today, as we face a weakened Voting Rights Act, and as state legislatures
across the country erect new barriers to the ballot box, it’s going to
take another historic movement and strong leadership from President Biden
to pass new federal voting rights legislation and save our democracy
before it’s too late.

I have shared below an op-ed I authored for CNN that expresses my hope
that President Biden will rise to the occasion to pass the For the People
Act — and why I believe Texas will be central to the fight to save our
democracy.

[ [link removed] ]You can also find the op-ed here.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to read it,

Beto

 

***

There have been three critical moments where Texas has proved decisive for
democracy and voting rights in this country. The first two, in 1890 and
1965, afford us key insights into how we can make the most of the third
one — taking place right now.

After Reconstruction, states throughout the South were rife with White
supremacist terrorism, racial injustice and attacks on Black voting rights
— and by the late 19th century, Texas was among the most brutal.
Whites-only Democratic clubs and their armed militias had "purified" the
ballot box in one Texas county after another. Political violence,
assassinations and lynchings enforced White rule throughout much of the
state at the expense of Black lives and Black voting rights.

In the Washington County election of 1886, for example, ballot boxes in
Black precincts were stolen at gunpoint by agents of a Whites-only
political ring known as the "People's Party." When Black poll workers
dared to fight back at one of the precincts, they were arrested, and three
of them — Shad Felder, Alfred Jones and Stewart Jones — were lynched by a
mob. No one was ever brought to justice.

The national outrage this produced compelled Congress to hold hearings on
the troubled voting practices that plagued Texas and much of the South.
The resulting Federal Elections Bill of 1890 promised greater federal
intervention to protect the right to vote in any state where it was
threatened.

Like the Democratic Party today, the Republican Party of 1890 had recently
won majorities in the US House and Senate, and, with the election of
Benjamin Harrison in 1888, controlled the presidency, too. And like
today's Democratic Party, those Republicans publicly resolved to use that
power to secure voting rights, especially for the Black targets of voter
suppression efforts in the South. The Federal Elections Bill duly passed
the House of Representatives that year and debate on its passage soon
began in the Senate.

But unfortunately for that bill and for millions of Black Americans, the
Senate Republicans were unable — or perhaps unwilling — to overcome a
filibuster threat led by the Democrats. It didn't help that Harrison, who
had campaigned on a platform of restoring voting rights, remained on the
sidelines for much of the action.

So, after all the righteous indignation over the election outrage in Texas
had been spent, the majority party meekly gave up the fight for voting
rights. They blinked in the face of the filibuster and denied America the
chance to establish a true multiracial democracy.

In the aftermath, state legislatures throughout the former Confederacy
imposed Whites-only primary laws and additional forms of Jim Crow voter
suppression, including poll taxes, literacy tests and extraordinary
residency requirements (all of which Whites could bypass thanks to the
"grandfather clause" that exempted those whose grandfathers had been
registered voters).

It took 75 years, a relentless voting rights movement and the first
president from Texas to provide another opportunity to reestablish the
right to vote in the South. Soon after Congress passed the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pressed
President Lyndon B. Johnson to work on an accompanying voting rights bill.
After Johnson told activists that he just didn't have the power to move
Congress, King resolved to "get the President some power."

Over the following months, civil and voting rights leaders brought the
issue to the forefront of the national conversation. Through protests and
marches, direct action and extraordinary courage, they successfully
engaged the conscience of the country. And when John Lewis was beaten
within an inch of his life leading a march from Selma to Montgomery on
March 7, 1965, Johnson finally had the power he needed.

[ [link removed] ]Selma to Montgomery march

Just eight days after Bloody Sunday, the President convened a joint
session of Congress and told the assembled members that no other issue was
as important as securing the country's democracy. "Should we defeat every
enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be
unequal to this issue," he said, "then we will have failed as a people and
as a nation."

As far as Johnson was concerned, no short-term political interest would
compromise the intensity of this fight for the most important of American
rights. By using the full power of the presidency, he helped move Congress
to pass the Voting Rights Act on August 5, 1965 and signed it into law the
next day.

[ [link removed] ]Signing of the Voting Rights Act

As long as the law stood, states would be forced to tear down barriers to
the ballot box and guarantee equal voting access to every eligible
American.

But it turned out that the law could not stand forever.

When the US Supreme Court stripped critical protections from the Voting
Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, Southern
legislatures responded in much the same way that they did following the
end of Reconstruction and the defeat of the Elections Bill of 1890: they
moved to dramatically restrict the ability to vote. This time, voter
suppression would come in the form of new voter ID laws, polling place
closures and racially gerrymandered districts designed to reduce the
voting power of Black and minority voters, the poor, the very young and
the very old.

This anti-democratic movement aggressively metastasized following former
President Donald Trump's Big Lie about widespread election fraud in the
2020 election. In just the first six months of this year, more than a
dozen states enacted new laws to make it easier to restrict access to the
ballot box.

In Texas, the Republican-led legislature's voter suppression bill was bad
enough for Democratic lawmakers to leave the state for Washington, D.C. in
an effort to block its passage and plead for federal action in the form of
the For the People Act.

Much like the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, the For the People Act's
provisions are commensurate with the scope of the current threat to
American democracy. The bill would ensure equal access to early voting and
mail-in voting, establish automatic voter registration, make election day
a national holiday and end gerrymandering (redistricting used to "draw"
people of color out of voting power in states like Texas). In March, the
House passed the For the People Act on a party-line vote, just like with
the 1890 elections bill.

But the For the People Act has been stopped by the threat of a filibuster
in the Senate, in a manner quite similar to the 1890 elections bill.
Though Democrats have the power to overcome this procedural vestige of
segregation, they have been paralyzed by intra-party disagreements and an
unwillingness to take seriously the challenges faced by Black and brown
voters. Their inaction risks dooming the bill to failure.

That defeat doesn't have to be America's fate.

Just as civil rights leaders and everyday Americans successfully pushed
Johnson to use the power of his office to pass voting rights, we can do
the same to push President Joe Biden to make voting rights his number one
priority — and to place all of his political capital into urging the
Senate to carve out an exception to the filibuster. (Exceptions already
exist for federal judges, Supreme Court justices, budget deals and
fast-track trade agreements.)

Those Texas Democratic legislators who took the fight to the nation's
capital are pushing the President to do just that. Their quorum break,
which will end on August 6, exactly 56 years after the signing of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, has bought us some time to save free and fair
elections before it's too late.

The question is, what will the President do with it?

Biden is certainly no Harrison, who campaigned for office on a platform of
voting rights but then allowed the matter to languish once in office. In
fact, Biden gave an extraordinarily powerful speech in Philadelphia
earlier this month, describing in the starkest of terms the existential
threat our democracy faces. If he follows that up by using the tremendous
power of his office to help change the rules of the filibuster to save our
democracy, he will stand alongside Johnson as a champion and savior of
American democracy.

But he must take to heart the lessons of Texas: when we fight for the
right to vote, we can expand democracy to include everyone. But when we
give up without a fight, we can lose democracy itself.

Op-Ed in CNN:
[ [link removed] ][link removed]

Photo 1: U.S. Library of Congress
Photo 2: Bettman Archive/Getty Images

[ [link removed] ]Donate »


 


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