Tomorrow, I expect to be arrested in front of the White House.

I’ll be joining colleagues from Public Citizen — along with leaders and activists from partner organizations including the League of Women Voters and People For the American Way — in urging President Biden to do everything in his power to ensure passage of essential democracy legislation.

Tell President Biden:

Our very democracy is on the line. We need you to do everything you can to ensure passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Add your name.

Why do I think it’s sensible and important to engage in civil disobedience right now?

The short answer is:

Our democracy is facing an existential crisis.

We need political leaders to do everything they can to head off that existential threat. And that means we need to do everything we can do, as well.

Let me also give you a longer answer:

Public Citizen has been working to strengthen our democracy for the entirety of our 50 years.

• We’ve always understood a functioning democracy to be a crucial value in its own right and critical to achieve our broad agenda.

• After the Supreme Court handed down its heinous Citizens United ruling in 2010 — opening the door for unlimited election spending by billionaires and Big Business — our democracy work took on a different intensity.

• We knew Citizens United would give corporations and the super-rich even more power — and we made an organizational commitment to win a constitutional amendment to overturn the ruling.

• We’ve made incredible strides: getting more than 20 states on record in favor of an amendment, winning majority support in a vote in the U.S. Senate, and securing the support of now-President Biden.

In 2017 — amid the Trump assault on democracy — we helped convene a retreat among allies to plan for a post-Trump moment.

That led to the creation of the Declaration for American Democracy — a coalition of over 200 organizations — and the campaign to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and what is now the Freedom to Vote Act.

This reflected a vision to build a big tent coalition to address a panoply of democracy imperatives: end Big Money dominance of elections, stop racist voter suppression, and eliminate extreme partisan and racist gerrymandering.

Those issues have only become more severe since we created the coalition:

• Just 100 individuals are responsible for 70% of all Super PAC contributions.

• Among many other shocking examples, Georgia has made it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote — even when those lines are likely to be long due to the state’s closure of polling places.

• States right now are rushing to create contorted congressional districts designed to favor the party that controls state government, irrespective of logical geographic and community boundaries. Experts project that current gerrymandering by itself may be enough to flip control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Each of these problems, on its own, threatens to hollow out our democracy. Combined, they are a disaster.

But the threat we face is even worse than all that.

We are witnessing before our eyes the coming together of a proto-fascist movement that has a categorically different disdain for democracy than anything we’ve seen in generations.

This is connected with Trump, to be sure, but it runs deeper than Trump.

• It is evidenced not just by the January 6 insurrection, but by the entire effort to promote the Big Lie.

• This is not just a sore loser narrative. It is a campaign to displace democracy altogether.

• It is evident in the legal memorandums presented to Trump that claimed to show him a pathway to block certification of the 2020 election results.

• It is evident in the high-level associates who encouraged Trump to declare martial law.

• It is frighteningly present in efforts to empower state officials to override election results determined by independent election officials.

• And it is dangerously displayed in the slide to normalization of political violence — seen recently in Rep. Paul Gosar’s posting of a cartoon video in which he portrays himself murdering Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

There’s a lot we have to do to counter this rising fascistic strain. The first and most important thing is to strengthen and firm up our democracy.

That’s why it’s imperative that we win passage of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

• Versions of these bills have passed the House of Representatives.

• In the Senate, every Democrat supports them — which, with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, means there is a Senate majority in favor right now. (One Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, supports the John Lewis bill with modest revisions.)

• But because of the filibuster, majority support is not enough in the Senate.

• We need the Democrats to adopt some kind of workaround for the filibuster.

• And to convince Senator Joe Manchin to agree to that, we need the full and total engagement of President Biden.

• Which brings us to tomorrow’s protest.

Civil disobedience is part of a long and honorable tradition in America, and around the world.

One thing civil disobedience often does is call attention to moral wrongs. And that’s something we will surely be doing tomorrow: to highlight the evils of voter suppression, election subversion, and election rigging.

Civil disobedience is a moral statement, but it is not just that.

It is also a protest and advocacy tactic.

• President Biden has said he supports some workaround to the filibuster to ensure, at minimum, passage of key democracy legislation.

• This is a big deal, because not only does he have the power of the presidency, he has enormous influence with Democratic senators, including Manchin, who are reluctant to agree to some changes to filibuster rules.

• Biden knows the Senate as well as anyone — he is friends with senators who value the filibuster and he values the filibuster’s historic role. He is a reluctant supporter of filibuster reform, which adds to his credibility.

So what we need from President Biden is not just his announced support for a workaround to the filibuster problem, but his intensive and urgent engagement to make it happen.

With our protest tomorrow, that’s what we aim to help make happen.

Thanks for taking action.

And stay tuned for a report back on tomorrow’s protest.

For democracy,

- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen
 
 
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