The John Lewis Voting Rights Act will not pass in this Congress. That's a simple mathematical fact. Efforts at some form of bipartisan compromise legislation have predictably gone nowhere beyond Manchin and Murkowski's fantasy world.
However, there is one thing that absolutely needs fixing and might actually be fixable with the filibuster still in place: The Electoral Count Act. This is an antique law passed as a compromise between states' rights Democrats and Republicans a decade after the fustercluck of the 1876 election. That election saw two sets of electors submitted from three Southern states still under Military Reconstruction, South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida (of course it was Florida). The competing sets of ballots were ruled on by a Committee with nine Republicans and eight Democrats, handing the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes, the quintessential Anonymous Bearded Ohioan. In return, the last vestiges of Reconstruction were ended and White "Redeemer" governments re-imposed Master Race Democracy.
It took a decade to write a proper law to accommodate any future instances of contested slates of Electoral College ballots and there are apparent loopholes that John Eastman tried to drive the Trump Coup through a year ago. Eastman's idea was to contest the critical states with a few diehard Trumpists like Paul Gosar, throw the count into chaos, threaten the count with a mob and have Mike Pence certify that the contested electoral votes don't count, throwing the election to the House, where Trump would win.
Even Mitch McConnell has signaled an openness to make it harder for another 1/6 to occur.
Frankly, Democrats should bring a bipartisan, stand-alone reform of the Electoral Count Act to the floor, vote on it and see where Republicans really stand. This doesn't preclude further work on other voting rights legislation, but it at least patches a critical flaw in how we elect our presidency.
I said the other day that many of our political institutions are inadequate to moment. Federalism was a great idea at the time to get independent republics - which is effectively how the original thirteen states saw themselves - to subsume some sovereignty to a national government. There are important positives to federalism, in terms of how different states accommodate different budgetary and cultural needs.
Elections for federal office, however, should be governed by federal law. That is at the heart of the current impasse. Democrats are pressing for a uniform standard that increases access to the ballot. Republicans want to leave it to the states, where they have advantages due to natural and partisan gerrymanders. Tackling the low hanging fruit of standardizing the Electoral College Count to prevent another attempted coup isn't going to solve Republican efforts to stop people from voting, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
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