No Time to Lose: Why Democrats Should Include Voting Rights In Their Build Back Better Compromise

No Time to Lose: Why Democrats Should Include Voting Rights In Their Build Back Better Compromise
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/99047

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Nothing is more important to the future of the republic and to the future of the Democratic party than voting legislation.

This is increasingly clear to many across the political spectrum (it is equally clear that the fate of the republic is now indissolubly linked to the fate of the Democrats, for the Republican party has become an anti-system party in thrall to Trump). Last week’s “Open Letter in Defense of Democracy” is one sign of this.

And it is quite astonishing that there seems to have been no public discussion of the most obvious way for Democrats to move beyond the current stasis—for the compromise about Build Back Better to actually be linked to voting legislation.

It’s simple. Why can’t Progressive Democrats get with Congressional leadership, and with the White House, and then announce a proposal tailor-made for Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema:

They will agree to support the much-scaled back, $1.75 Build Back Better plan, and to vote to pass the “Bipartisan” Infrastructure Bill immediately, in exchange for immediate passage of the Freedom to Vote Act engineered by none other than Joe Manchin.

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The Democrats need some such compromise in order to avoid disaster at the polls in the next few election cycles. If Democrats can build their majority, then they can live to fight another day among themselves about the more ambitious policy agenda that the country needs, that Biden promised, but that, alas, he simply cannot now deliver.

If Democrats do not act now, on voting rights, then the party, and the republic itself, will be in grave danger.

The fate of social policy is inextricably tied to the fate of democracy.

It’s time to state this clearly, and to act on it, by linking the two matters to craft a legislative compromise.

There is no time to lose.