Hey Indivisibles,

Ezra here with an update on where things stand on the democracy fight. I
hate getting emails all the time that say, “the sky is falling!” The only
thing worse is blindly optimistic emails that promise victory with no
believable plan or hope for achieving it. So I’m going to do my best to be
direct with you -- I think that’s the best way for us to strategize as a
movement together.

So here’s the deal: real talk, we’ve missed a crucial deadline for
democracy. For months we have been saying we need to pass the For the
People Act (S. 1) before the August recess. That deadline was informed by
elections experts who gave us a clear analysis: GOP states can begin
gerrymandering once the census data comes out in August. If Congress fails
to pass the gerrymandering reforms in S. 1 before the gerrymanders start,
we’ll be in a weaker position when the GOP inevitably challenges those
reforms in court. 

Well, the Census data for congressional maps comes out this Thursday, and
Congress went into recess today without passing S. 1 or its
anti-gerrymandering provisions. That means that states like Texas,
Arizona, Florida, and Georgia will all start drawing maps to gerrymander
the GOP into power next year.

There’s no sugarcoating this: due to this failure to pass the bill in
time, we are now in a weaker position to stop the coming GOP
gerrymandering. We can still pass S. 1, but there’s a greater chance now
that the courts will uphold some or all of the GOP gerrymandered maps in
2022. These are the cold hard consequences of the legislative delay.

If you are disappointed and angry at this outcome, I’m right there with
you. For those of us having this emotional response, I think we have to
answer three questions:

 1. What can legislation actually accomplish now? Having missed this
deadline, what is possible through federal democracy legislation? Is
it too late to do any good?
 2. Who do we have to win over? Another way to ask this is: which
decision-makers worked publicly or behind the scenes against us
getting S. 1 done before the August recess?
 3. How can we help? What can we as individuals and local Indivisible
groups actually do in the coming weeks to increase our odds of winning
this legislative fight?

I’ll try to answer these questions below. 

What can legislation actually accomplish now? 

Short version: The gerrymandering provisions are weaker, but we still have
the opportunity to pass this bill to expand voting rights, get money out
of politics, protect elections, and beat back GOP voter suppression
countrywide. 

Despite blowing through the “Deadline for Democracy,” S. 1 is still a live
bill -- it has not been defeated, and our allies in the Senate are not
throwing in the towel. This is meaningful -- a totally plausible
alternative scenario for August could have been a failed attempt to end
the filibuster and pass S. 1, followed by an announcement that the Senate
was moving on. 

That’s not what happened. Instead, this week, we saw renewed Democratic
commitment to finding a path forward and renewed Republican
obstructionism. Here’s how it played out:

* All Democrats voted in favor of bringing the For the People Act to the
floor for consideration. Majority Leader Schumer asked for Unanimous
Consent to proceed to debate. Republicans blocked it.
* Schumer asked for Unanimous Consent to consider a standalone campaign
finance transparency bill. Republicans blocked it.
* Schumer asked for Unanimous Consent to consider a standalone
anti-gerrymandering bill. Republicans blocked it.
* Following these votes, Schumer committed to bringing S. 1 back up as
soon as the Senate comes back from recess in September.

For those Democratic senators standing in the way of eliminating the
filibuster -- Schumer has given them a task: find these mythical GOP votes
for democracy reform, or get prepared to vote to reform the filibuster so
we can pass this bill. 

Let’s say we’re successful in September -- substantively, what does
passing S. 1 after August recess do for our democracy? As discussed above,
the anti-gerrymandering provision will be weaker, but the rest of the bill
will remain strong. Automatic voter registration, universal vote by mail,
making election day a national holiday, election security, campaign
finance reforms, and national voter protections to undo the voter
suppression laws passing in GOP-led states -- all of this would have a
real direct impact on protecting our democracy, even if the bill is
enacted after August. 

There might come a day where I write to say that we simply do not have the
votes to get the bill passed during this Congress or that it’s too late
for the bill to impact 2022, even if we were to pass it. But that day is
not today. Everyone we work with on this campaign -- our own team, our
allies on Capitol Hill, our partners in the advocacy community --
continues to believe this is winnable and impactful. I won’t sugarcoat the
challenges we face, but I sure as hell will not throw in the towel just
because we’re down a few points.

Who do we have to win over?

Short version: Sinema and Manchin are only partly to blame for this delay.
Carper, Coons, and possibly others should all be on your list. And
President Biden should top your list -- we need him to get in the game.

If you’re reading this email, you already know that Senators Sinema and
Manchin have been key barriers in delaying changes to the filibuster this
year. But just because those two get most of the press does not mean that
those two are the only obstacles we face. 

From our allies in the Senate -- both staff and senators -- we know that
behind closed doors, there are other senators who provide Manchin and
Sinema with cover for their intransigence on filibuster reform. Just last
week, we learned that the two Democratic senators from Delaware, Coons,
and Carper, are backing Manchin and Sinema as they delay filibuster reform
discussions. There may or may not be others working to sideline democracy
reform behind the scenes, so it’s not enough to just focus on Manchin and
Sinema -- we have to get all of our Democratic senators vocally on the
side of immediate filibuster reform.

But our biggest challenge goes beyond the Senate. Our star player isn’t
even in the game. We all worked our butts off last year to elect Joe Biden
and get him a Democratic congress. And Joe Biden agrees with us on the
stakes -- he’s described Trump’s Big Lie and the avalanche of GOP voter
suppression as the greatest threat to our republic since the Civil War.
But while he shares our diagnosis, his team has suggested that we can
simply “out-organize” the GOP vote suppression and election subversion.
Carper and Coons represent his home state -- a simple call from the
President would be enough to remove that obstacle. But rather than use his
power to move senators to save our democracy, he’s been laser-focused on
using his power to move senators on infrastructure. 

We see the impact he can have on the Senate when he takes up a cause -- we
just need to see him take up our democracy with the same zeal he
demonstrates on roads and bridges.

How can we help?

Summary: Local pressure has gotten us this far. To get us to the finish
line, we have to get creative about convincing key decision-makers to
switch to our side.

Months into this legislative fight, we’ve shown up at rallies, town halls,
marches, and campaign events. We’ve written op-eds, signed onto joint
letters, and talked to innumerable journalists in radio, print journalism,
and TV. We’ve garnered literally billions upon billions of impressions
from our earned media. We’ve worked with allies in the civil rights
community, faith community, labor leaders, climate leaders, and fleeing
Texas legislators. We’ve orchestrated nationwide mobilizations, run
targeted ads, and overwhelmed Senate offices with call-in days. Together,
we have applied more consistent, nationwide grassroots pressure on this
issue than the political system has experienced on anything else this year
-- and it’s not close.

But that begs the question: so what? If we failed to get this done before
August recess, what has all this accomplished? 

The answer is: actually, quite a lot! It was not guaranteed that the House
would prioritize and pass the For the People Act in the first few weeks of
this Congress. It wasn’t guaranteed that the Senate would also prioritize
it and move it through the committee process with unanimous Democratic
support. It was not guaranteed that the Senate Majority Leader would
repeatedly declare that “Failure is not an option.” Senate
institutionalists like Amy Klobuchar, Jon Tester, and Dick Durbin were not
guaranteed to shift their position and embrace filibuster reform. It was
not guaranteed that Senate Democratic leadership would continue to
publicly push for the bill despite unified GOP opposition.

What’s clear is the main reason that the democracy fight is still alive is
because of grassroots pressure. We’ve heard this at the highest levels
from our allies on Capitol Hill -- decision-makers who would very much
rather just move on from this fight know that they can’t risk alienating
the grassroots supporters who got them elected in the first place. They
know they will have to go back to you soon next year and ask for support
in the elections. They don’t want to piss us all off. 

And they know failure on this front will piss us all off -- because we’ve
been open about our expectations.

Still, here we are, at the beginning of August recess with no legislative
victory. As of this writing, President Biden has yet to throw his full
weight into the fight, and we don’t yet have the Senate votes to reform
the filibuster.

There’s no getting around it: we have to solve both these problems. Yes,
of course, we need Manchin and Sinema and Coons and Carper. But we need
all of our senators to be active, public champions. We need firm, public
commitments from each of them to take up filibuster reform when they come
back from recess. [ [link removed] ]We need each of our senators to be as consistently
vocal on the filibuster as Senator Padilla or Senator Merkley is just
about every day. We need each of our representatives to apply as much
public pressure on President Biden as Representative Mondaire Jones
regularly does. Even if you don’t have a Democratic senator or
representative, I guarantee you have Democratic state representatives or
state senators in your state who should be signing onto this campaign --
[ [link removed] ]click here for instructions from Indivisible Ventura on how to ask them
to do just that.

Have a drink. Watch some Ted Lasso. Get a good night’s sleep. Then rejoin
the fight.

As advocates for democracy, it’s tough to be in the muddy middle of a
campaign, especially after a partial setback like this. We have to balance
being angry but not cynical; disappointed but not hopeless; frustrated but
not powerless. To strike that balance, it helps me to understand where we
are, where we need to go, and what we have the power to do. So to
summarize the 1900 words you just read:

 1. Filibuster reform and S. 1 are still winnable fights, even if the
Senate’s failure to get this done before August recess has real
consequences that we can’t avoid.
 2. There are a set of senators who we need to get on our side, and we may
not be able to win this unless Joe Biden throws his full weight into
this fight.
 3. Politicians move when pushed, and it’s our job to push them.

We couldn’t take for granted that we would get this far. We can’t take for
granted that we will make it the rest of the way. But the path to victory
is in front of us. And if you’ll allow me one single blindly optimistic
note to end on: I believe that we will win.

In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-founder, Indivisible

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