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Opinion | Manchin and Sinema Have Their History Wrong
Jamelle Bouie
13-17 minutes
Jamelle Bouie
July 30, 2021
Credit...United States Information Agency/PhotoQuest, via Getty Images
The attack on voting rights in this country is partisan. The response must be partisan as well. But whether out of unspoken political concerns or genuine conviction, key Democrats in Washington do not have the stomach for the partisan combat it would take to stop that attack.
“The right to vote is fundamental to our American democracy and protecting that right should not be about party or politics,” Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia
wrote last month. “Least of all, protecting this right, which is a value I share, should never be done in a partisan manner.”
Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has taken a similar stance against partisan lawmaking on contentious issues. “The best way to achieve durable, lasting results?” she wrote in
an op-ed for The Washington Post. “Bipartisan cooperation.” Ending the legislative filibuster to protect voting rights, she says, would be a mistake. “Would it be good for our country if we did, only to see that legislation rescinded a few years from now and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law or restrictions on voting by mail in federal elections, over the objections of the minority?”
The problem with these arguments is that they can’t survive contact with a single, simple fact about American history: The fight to protect and advance the civil and voting rights of all Americans has always been more partisan than not.
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The 14th and the 15th Amendments — which along with the 13th were the constitutional foundations for civil and voting rights in America — were not passed on a bipartisan basis. The 14th Amendment passed on an almost total party-line vote in Congress, with Republicans standing against a Democratic Party that opposed federal intervention in the South. When legislatures in the states of the former Confederacy refused to ratify it, that same party-line majority passed the Reconstruction Acts in 1867 and 1868, which imposed military government on most of the South and made ratification of the amendment a precondition of readmission to the union.
The 15th Amendment was likewise partisan, passed on a party-line vote in both chambers of Congress. And while Republicans controlled most state legislatures at the time, the amendment still faced fierce opposition from Democrats wherever they could mount it. “In California, where the Chinese outnumbered blacks ten to one in 1870, linking the amendment to Chinese suffrage as a Democratic tactic to defeat the amendment was particularly successful,” the historian
Wang Xi notes in “
The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860-1910.”
“In Maryland,” he went on, “the all-Democratic legislature unanimously refused to ratify the 15th Amendment in February 1870, and only when the ratification of the amendment by the requisite 28 states appeared certain did the state pass a Black registration bill.”
The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 — the first of which was an early voting rights bill (forbidding state officials from discriminating among voters on the basis of race) and the second of which gave the federal government the tools needed to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan — were also passed over unified Democratic opposition.
“Of all the legislation proposed by this or any other Congress, there is none, in my judgment, more unwarrantable and unjustifiable than that proposed by this bill,”
declared Representative Charles A. Eldredge of Wisconsin of the second Enforcement Act, which also came to be known as the Ku Klux Klan Act. “It is absolutely atrocious,” he continued. “It is hideous and revolting.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned discrimination in many public accommodations, was
similarly partisan — passed against
unanimous Democratic opposition — and the Federal Elections Bill of 1890, a last-ditch effort to protect what was left of Black voting rights in the South, fell to a Democratic filibuster in the Senate.
It is true that the landmark civil rights bills of the 1960s were bipartisan (although to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, supporters had to neutralize a Southern filibuster in the Senate). But the two parties were not yet, at this point in their histories, defined by a single ideology. There were strongly liberal Republicans and archconservative Democrats, each a significant faction within their respective parties.
But that era of ideologically diverse parties and bipartisan lawmaking was an aberration — the product of factors unique to the period, among them the near-total exclusion of Black Americans from elections in the South, which kept segregationists in the Democratic Party and forestalled any alignment along ideological lines.
We are living in an age of high partisanship and deep polarization, where one party has an interest in a broad electorate and an open conception of voting rights, and the other does not. If Congress is going to pass a voting rights bill of any kind, it is going to be on a partisan basis, much the way it was from the end of the Civil War until well into the 20th century. Democrats will either accept this and do what needs to be done or watch their fortunes suffer in the face of voter suppression, disenfranchisement and election subversion.
This isn’t idle speculation. In Georgia, where Republican lawmakers revamped their state election laws
under postdefeat pressure from Donald Trump, who wanted election officials to throw out Democratic ballots and proclaim him the winner, state lawmakers can now fire and co-opt local election management. Critics said this would permit the Republican-controlled state legislature to potentially challenge ballots in predominantly Democratic areas, and at this moment, it appears that Republicans are hoping to bring elections in Fulton County — a major Democratic stronghold — under state control.
“State House Speaker David Ralston,”
reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, proposed an investigation “to look for irregularities and fraud. And Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger said Fulton’s elections supervisor should be fired.”
In the absence of a new voting rights bill, President Biden has reportedly
urged voting rights groups to “out-organize” voter suppression and neutralize Republican “election integrity” laws through superior tactics.
But there’s no out-organizing the effort to take over the election process itself; there’s no activism that can stop Republican state legislatures from giving themselves the power to contest or overturn an election result. And it is unconscionable to insist that voters jump through hoops and overcome an ever-growing series of obstacles to exercise a fundamental right of citizenship.
At this point in American history, the right to vote is a partisan issue. So, for that matter, are the principles of majority rule and political equality.
The only alternative to a partisan voting bill, in other words, is no bill at all, with too many Americans at the mercy of a political party that treats voting like a privilege, and will do everything in its power to make it so.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington.
@jbouie
A version of this article appears in print on July 31, 2021, Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Manchin and Sinema Have Their History Wrong.
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Y'all want that vote in 22 and 24 and don't won't all of those white judges you better deliver on some of those promises from 2020.
