Question: How do we know our democracy is broken? Answer: When the vast majority wants things it just can’t get.

 

On yesterday’s episode of Deadline Whitehouse, Matthew Dowd broke it down for us. Whether we’re talking about preserving voting rights; increasing availability of health insurance; enacting gun reform; or guaranteeing equality for women and people of color, the majority of Americans have made it clear they want a true democracy. Republicans, on the other hand, are doing everything they can to prevent that.

“They want a tyranny of the minority…they fundamentally don’t want the voices of all of America to be heard.”

If you’ve been following the rampant Republican rush to curtail voting rights, you already know the filibuster has thus far kept Dems from protecting voting rights on a national level, despite the fact that more than 400 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states in the 2021 legislative sessions.

While it’s also true that over 900 bills with expansive provisions have been introduced, those that have passed have done so largely in states where access to voting is already strong. The larger threat is the Republican push to redirect the vote count away from state Secretaries of State and into the hands of state legislatures.

As former Senator Claire McCaskill pointed out on the same episode of Deadline Whitehouse, as Democrats have increasingly focused their efforts on national elections, Republicans have been systematically taking over state legislatures. The result: even if the majority votes one way, when the votes are counted, Republicans will be in position to move the needle.

As Joseph Stalin is famous for saying in 1923 “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

While some will point to the recent passing of the infrastructure bill as proof our democracy is working, Dowd disagrees. “It’s very easy to pass a give-away bill…people didn’t have to make any hard decision on giving away free money and building bridges and roads. That’s not the test of a democracy. The test of a democracy is voting rights and we’re failing that test today.”

The main argument Dowd makes so compellingly is that we need to do things differently. The old ways aren’t working. Witness Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema and their refusal to consider a temporary halt to the filibuster in order to get voting rights legislation passed. Despite the Democratic majority in the Senate, as long as Republicans can rely on the filibuster, majority cannot rule.

As 57 Texas state Democrats made clear with their exodus to D.C. (a last resort to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass voter restrictions) we’re out of time. This crisis isn’t just about voting rights, it’s the fact that decades of gerrymandering has left us with a Congress so evenly divided it can’t get anything done. It’s not that our country is so evenly divided, it’s that our representation doesn’t mirror the wishes of our people.

To quote Matthew Dowd, again, “Where the voters are, and where the politicians are, are in two fundamentally different places. And gerrymandering is only partly to blame.”

There is no gerrymandering in the Senate, yet states with low populations get the same number of seats in the Senate as states with huge populations. This throws the balance of power in the Senate in favor of the least populous areas. How bad is it? Six U.S. Senators represent the same number of constituents as 60 U.S. Senators in another state.

There is only one way to change that: amend the Constitution.

How likely is that? Hard to say. One could argue that when it was written, no one had any way of knowing how great an imbalance we would suffer with population centers growing at such disproportionate rates.

Still, if Congress can’t agree voting rights, how likely is it that they’ll come together for a Constitutional amendment?

Merrick Garland and state Democratic leaders may be our only real hope. Garland has already instructed the DOJ to initiate a lawsuit against the state of Georgia for their recently enacted voter suppression laws. If he does the same in other states, the legal proceedings may keep such the laws from taking effect before the 2022 mid-terms. That would certainly help.

And just two days ago, the Democratic Governor of WI, Tony Evers, vetoed voting restrictions passed by the Republicans in his state. Fortunately, in this case, Republicans do not have enough votes to override his veto.

In the meantime, almost half of the 57 Texas state Democrats who have so far successfully deprived the Republican counterparts of the quorum needed to pass voter restrictions have begun to head home, leaving just 26 in DC — not enough to deny Republicans their quorum. But a Texas judge has stepped up to help. Travis County Judge Brad Urrutia, a Democrat, signed an order that will protect the Texas Democrats “from being arrested, detained, or confined in any way for two weeks.” A small win given that all Dems can do at this point is postpone the inevitable.

Republicans still have a chance to fight the order in a hearing scheduled for August 20. And you can bet they will.