In a democracy — or, if you prefer, a republic — the government’s actions are supposed to reflect the will of the majority. That’s why we vote: to discover who the majority of the citizenry wants to hold office and what policies they want to have put in place by those they have elected. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But the sad reality is that the United States has for years been ruled by a backward-thinking, repressive, xenophobic minority.
There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that the nation’s most powerful legislative body — the U.S. Senate — is absurdly undemocratic. Republican senators haven’t represented a real majority of the country’s population since 1996, yet the GOP has managed to delay and obstruct the will of the majority for 25 years.
Currently, the 50 GOP senators represent 43.5 percent of the country’s population, mostly due to the absurdity of states such as Wyoming, which has 578,000 citizens (about half the number of people living in Shelby County) having the same representation in the U.S. Senate as California’s 40 million citizens. California has 80 times the number of people as Wyoming and both states have equal representation in the Senate. It’s ludicrous.
More than 56 percent of the country’s population is represented by 50 Democratic senators, but they can’t pass gun-control measures, election reform, healthcare reform, tax reform, or any number of mildly progressive laws, because Senator Turd Ferguson of South Dakota doesn’t like it.
There’s little likelihood real change will take place in the structure of the Senate, and the GOP knows the only chance of retaining power is to continue to thwart the will of the majority by making it harder for people to vote, especially people of color and people with limited resources, who tend to vote for Democrats.
All across the country in states controlled by the GOP, restrictive voting laws are being proposed and enacted, including reducing the number of polling places and early voting days, restricting voting by mail, purging voter rolls, limiting voter-registration periods, restricting absentee ballots, eliminating Sunday voting, and even banning anyone from providing water to people in long voting lines. It’s Jim Crow all over again. And it’s out in the open.
From last November through January 6th, the former president defamed the American electoral process. But those who went along with Trump’s Big Lie weren’t trying to “stop the steal,” they were trying to stop democracy. And they still are.
The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed (on a party line vote, naturally) a bill known as H.R. 1 — the For the People Act. It would eliminate the voter suppression tactics that Georgia just enacted, for example, and would codify the voting process to make it equal for all U.S. citizens, no matter what state they live in. The bill requires states to maintain a voter database with universal automatic registration. In other words, if you’re a citizen and can prove it, you’re registered to vote. No more jumping through hoops at the local level. H.R. 1 mandates at least a 15-day early voting period, and institutes independent commissions to set Congressional district boundaries to eliminate gerrymandering.
It’s a big deal, but it has no chance whatsoever to pass the Senate, since it would need at least 10 GOP votes. Which brings Senate Democrats to a crossroads decision: Should they attempt to eliminate the filibuster so that the bill could pass with 50 votes, plus one from the vice-president, or just let the GOP do what it’s done for the last 25 years: undermine the will of the majority?
Eliminating the filibuster means if the GOP gets control of the Senate back at some future date, they could ram through all kinds of racist and corporatist policies (kind of like they’ve done for the last four years). But this is no time to be timid. Democracy is in the balance. It’s time to take back the reins of power and respect the will of the people. It’s time to stop the steal.
