Voting: The time is now for Biden to step up
Author: Gladwyn d'Souza | Category: Unkown category | Date: 07-30-2021
Last week America suddenly awoke to the possibility that voting wasn’t a guaranteed right. The dark days of 2016-2020 had passed, cleansed it seemed, by a pandemic. Biden’s election appeared to have put to rest the idea that being minority or poor could lead to disenfranchisement.
But the dream of the 3/5th compromise has never faded from American life. Nixon, Reagan, and Bush had done their parts to ensure that the electoral college would elect presidents, not the popular vote. The good people on both sides had managed to hail a new racist regime out of their terror of “the Kenyan” usurper. The regime lived on in the lie that voting irregularities themselves were to blame for the banishment of the dictator wanna-be. Now a concerted effort from sycophant states with Republican legislators eager to cozy up to Trump would ensure that white men would hold onto power in a changing America. CNN reported barely 6 months into the Biden presidency that “Seventeen states have enacted 28 new laws making it harder to vote.”
Then, as if the curtain lifted, America got to see the fruit of the racist regime. Their Supreme Court threw out another cornerstone of the voting rights act. According to the NYTimes, “The Supreme Court on Thursday gave states new latitude to impose restrictions on voting, using a ruling in a case from Arizona to signal that challenges to laws being passed by Republican legislatures that make it harder for minority groups to vote would face a hostile reception from a majority of the justices.”
Democrats scrambling to put Humpty Dumpty together again were confronted by other ghosts from the past. The bipartisan Republicans with whom they had worked on another colossal Pentagon budget had dissolved back into partisan rancor on behalf of the dictator-in-waiting. The filibuster designed to enshrine a plantation economy held strong, to keep the John Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2021 from breaching the walls of oppression. Worse, white southern democrats, within their own party, were unwilling to change Senate rules to bring a voting rights bill to Biden’s desk. Substandard housing, children in cages, murderers with a badge, fine people running over protesters, grabbing them by the pussy, were all likely to be kosher again. Legislative intent was what Republicans said it was, Democrats had no say in democracy.
The big lie is that Biden had won by cheating. More than 60 challenges through the courts had shown the big lie to be without substance, meritless on its claim, unable to hold water. Now 17 southern, repressive, and white controlled states are enshrining the lie by writing legislation to prevent the “cheating” that occurred on November 2nd 2020. The consequences would be the suppression of non-white voters in future elections. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, like Hurricane Sandy, had stalled on arrival. The subsequent deluge threatens to swamp democratic institutions across the country by reconfiguring Congress in the mid-term election and possibly the courts for generations.
Ten days ago Biden decried the assault on democracy calling it “an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections” in a historic manner that dates back to Jim Crow and the “poll taxes and literacy tests and the Ku Klux Klan campaigns of violence and terror that lasted into the ’50s and ’60s.” Biden is right to recall the dehumanization of black Americans and the subjugation of labor across the country from the Chinese in the west to southern European immigrants in the north; followed by the inevitable violence that bloodied the American promise during the Cold War. He is right to decry the subversion of the right to vote.
But he is wrong to conclude that voting restrictions are “an assault on who we are — who we are as Americans.” Because voting restrictions are being upheld in the Senate and Supreme Court by a plurality of Americans. Biden’s “we” is much smaller in the corridors of power than he would have us believe and we should bristle, like Baldwin in “No Name In The Street”, at what fine people are included under its umbrella. It’s much smaller in the text books and schools where the bigger lie- that America is the shining city on the hill, Camelot, whose innocence is sometimes tainted by bad actors- is reinforced. That defense budget in all its bipartisan glory ensures almost a 1000 bases around the world. Our cheap oil, lost under their sands- is retreived for us, by the blood of people considered less than us. Subjugated peoples from as far as Iraq and nearby as Haiti are unable to write their own histories, because they are harnessed, to power our consumption dreams. Our phones and cars are powered by precious metals extracted from disposable lands degraded by disposable people. Those democrats who can’t change the rules for the right to vote are also Americans. They are brought into Congress with the money corporations give them from our consumption pattern. As Jeff Bezos said thank you to the consumer for making America possible. Every day we buy to keep Mitch McConnell empowered for another vote.
Biden’s challenge today is to come to terms with the humanitarian crisis at the heart of our consumption patterns. He is not there. He needs to address the crisis of democracy around the world. He needs to address income inequality. He seems to have started down those roads. And he needs to acknowledge our role in subjugating people for their resources. As Haiti shows, he doesn’t want to touch that. He needs to overcome the filibuster and name Republicans who “know better” and can help him get there. None exist and pursuing this miasma is dangerous. He doesn’t have much time before a midterm election could unbalance the split Senate. He needs to be realistic about other areas in which he compromises with the Senate. The time is now, the challenge immense, and we need to ask Biden to step up.
