It’s still a long-shot, but possible, that the For the People Act and/or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act could squeak through Congress with changes to the filibuster (say, a narrow carve-out just for the issue of voting rights) that could get Joe Manchin, the last critical Democratic vote, on board.
But then whatever voting rights legislation passes will face the gauntlet of a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, itself stacked with Republican appointees, rigged by a combination of the workings of the Electoral College, McConnell’s cynical maneuvering, and plain bad luck. To the point the political composition of SCOTUS 2021 is now hopelessly out of alignment with how America actually voted in 2020, and perhaps will be for the next several decades regardless of future election results.
*Even if* new federal legislation protecting voting survives these hurdles, democracy in America may still be doomed.
For democracy cannot long endure when an entire political party, representing approximately half the country, no longer believes in it. The weight of democracy is too heavy for one party alone to carry it.
Over Trump’s Big Lies and the Jan. 6 riot, the machinery of democracy creaked on in 2020 as if by inertia, and Joe Biden was properly inaugurated, but history may judge this election as the one where the spirit of democracy in America died.
Without an animating commitment by the GOP to abide by election results without poisoning them with lies and after-the-fact restrictions, democracy is heading for an inevitable end.
I can’t predict exactly how it will end — whether by armed MAGA thugs appearing at urban precincts to intimidate voters, by Republican pollworkers shredding Democratic ballots, by Republican officials simply refusing to count and credit legitimate Democratic votes, by Republican legislatures voting themselves the authority to overrule their states’ voters and then doing it, by another Jan. 6 style riot/coup that actually works, or all of the above — but end it will, inevitably, if the Republican Party wants it to.
