A defeat of US voting rights bill will embolden efforts to overturn election results

As Biden and the Democrats mull the likely failure of their attempt to protect voting rights, Trump’s hold on the Republican Party and the popular imagination shows no sign of easing

Robert Delaney

Published: 1:30am, 18 Jan 2022

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Martin Luther King Jnr Day, on January 17 this year, marks the start of the week that US President Joe Biden is likely to see his effort to protect voting rights in America fall apart.

The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, written by his Democratic Party and championed by the US leader, would block efforts under way in several Republican-controlled states to restrict absentee voting. It would also stop state legislators from redrawing electoral boundaries in a way that undercuts minority voter representation, and make election day a public holiday.

Not a single Republican senator will support the bill, so Biden needs every Democrat in the chamber to vote for a change in rules governing the filibuster, a tradition that allows the minority party to block legislation that fails to garner 60 votes. But at least one, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, is opposing the move.

The timing is a cruel irony for Americans who tried to close a chapter of the country’s history that will sit alongside McCarthyism and Jim Crow.

A granite statue of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jnr is seen at his memorial in Washington, DC. Martin Luther King Day, which celebrates the January 15, 1929, birth of the civil rights icon, falls on January 17 this year. Photo: AFP

But that’s the point as far as the majority of Republicans are concerned. Winners write the history. Therefore, what the party’s new spiritual leader Donald Trump started when he incited his followers to try to overturn the 2020 election, must be carried out to its conclusion.

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” vision of America – full of bigotry, like the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the January 6 insurrection last year, and bereft of discernible policy – would ensure that any understanding about the brutality that Dr King faced down, along with countless other brave civil rights leaders, will be told differently in textbooks.

As the leaders of this movement see it, the men who wrote the US Constitution never intended that African-Americans or any other minorities, let alone women, would get the right to vote in the country’s elections.

They see the American experiment undermined by the encroachment of these groups into the electorate, and by progressive ideas that have loosened the grip on power that privileged white men have had since that sacred document was written.

There’s no sharper expression of this frustration than an armed attack on the branch of government closest to communities of all colours, creeds and orientations, and most vital to the experiment.

It’s not just radical white supremacists and cowardly centrist Republicans unwilling to speak out against Trump’s insurrectionist hordes who are trying to bury January 6.

A Trump supporter takes a photo after a mob forced its way into the US Capitol’s Rotunda, in Washington, DC, on January 6 last year. Photo: AFP

On the eve of the anniversary last week, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board denounced Democrats because they “seem intent on exploiting that day to retain power”, and went on to tell us that “on all available evidence January 6 was not an ‘insurrection’.”

Biden did himself no favours in delivering a fiery speech that many on the right said ran counter to his pledge to try to unite the country and those on the left deemed too little, too late.

The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act will fail regardless of the fallout from Biden’s speech because it would probably accelerate political equity. The expansion of absentee voting during the pandemic helped deliver states, including Georgia, to Biden in the 2020 election.

The outcome pushed Republican efforts to engineer greater control over balloting, which are assisted by Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him, despite the lack of any evidence supporting this assertion.

With some notable exceptions, Republicans have largely let “the big lie” stand and have downplayed January 6 to avoid being tarnished with, as Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney put it, “the worst attack on the Capitol since 1814”.

A supporter holds up a “Trump Won” sign at a rally by former president Donald Trump at the Canyon Moon Ranch festival grounds in Florence, Arizona, on January 15. Photo: Getty Images / AFP

It doesn’t matter that Republican officials in Georgia found no evidence of any irregularities that would have changed the outcome in that state or that Arizona’s Maricopa county debunked the characterisations of Trump and his allies in a 93-page rebuttal issued just ahead of the January 6 anniversary.

Most Republican voters now say they feel the election was stolen, according to a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll taken in October. That gives Trump leverage with Republican candidates who want to win primaries this year. They will forge ahead, on the state and county levels, with measures that will reverse measures that have made it easier to vote and give them more control over validation of the results.

Biden’s failing effort to get Congress to pass the voting rights bill all but ensures that American election outcomes going forward will be disputed if not overturned.

Maybe Martin Luther King Jnr Day will be better next year.

Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief