The former president’s attempted coup is not stopping. He still refuses to concede and continues to rile up supporters with his bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Tens of millions of Americans believe him.

Last Sunday, at a Republican event in Franklin, North Carolina, Congressman Madison Cawthorn, repeating Trump’s big lie, called the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 “political hostages.“  

Cawthorn also advised the crowd to begin stockpiling ammunition for what he said is likely to be American-versus-American “bloodshed” over unfavorable election results.

“Much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs,” he said, “there’s nothing I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American.”

On Tuesday, Texas Republicans passed a strict voter law based on Trump’s big lie – imposing new ID requirements on people seeking to vote by mail and criminal penalties on election officials who send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, empowering partisan poll watchers, and banning drive-through and 24-hour voting.

This year, at least 18 other states have enacted 30 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote, based on Trump’s lie.

On Thursday, at Trump’s instigation, Pennsylvania Republicans launched an investigation soliciting sworn testimony on election "irregularities,” scheduling the first hearing for next week.

Arizona’s Republican “audit” will report its results any day, but there’s little question what they’ll show. The CEO of the Cyber Ninjas, the firm hired to conduct it, has publicly questioned the election results, and the audit team consists of Trump supporters and is funded by a group led by Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

The Republican chair of the Wisconsin state assembly’s campaigns and elections committee has begun “a full, cyber-forensic audit” akin to Arizona’s. Trump’s first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, saysWisconsin Republicans are prepared to spend $680,000 on it.

These so-called audits won’t alter the outcome of the 2020 election. Their point is to cast further doubt on its legitimacy and justify additional state measures to suppress votes and alter future elections.

It’s a vicious cycle. As Trump continues to stoke his base with his big lie that the election was stolen, Republican lawmakers – out to advance their careers and entrench the GOP – are adding fuel to the fire, pushing more Americans into Trump’s paranoid nightmare.

The three top candidates to succeed Richard Burr in North Carolina all denounced the senator’s vote to convict Trump in his last impeachment trial. The four leading candidates to succeed Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania all embraced Trump’s call for an “audit” of election results.

A leading contender for Senate seat being vacated by Richard Shelby in Alabama is Representative Mo Brooks, best known for urging the crowd at Trump’s rally preceding the Capitol riot to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” Brooks has been endorsed by Trump.

Yet even as Trump’s attempted coup gains traction, most of the rest of America continues to sleep. We’ve become so outrage-fatigued by his antics, and so preoccupied with the more immediate threats of the Delta variant and climate-fueled wildfires and hurricanes, that we prefer not to know.

A month ago it was reported that during his last weeks in office Trump tried to strong-arm the Justice Department to falsely declare that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, even threatening to fire the acting attorney general if he didn’t: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen.”

The news barely registered on America’s collective mind. The Olympics and negotiations over the infrastructure bill got more coverage.

A top Trump adviser now says Trump is “definitely running” for president in 2024, even though the 14th Amendment to the constitution bars anyone from holding office who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the nation.  

Federal legislation that would pre-empt state voter suppression laws is bogged down in the Senate. Biden hasn’t made it a top priority. A House select committee to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot and Trump’s possible role is barely off the ground. The U.S Justice Department has made no move to indict the former president for anything.

But unless Trump and his co-conspirators are held accountable for the damage they have inflicted and continue to inflict on American democracy, and unless Senate Democrats and Biden soon enact national voting rights legislation, Trump’s attempted coup could eventually succeed.

It is imperative that America wake up.

You’d think President Biden and the Democratic Party leadership would do everything in their power to stop Republicans from undermining democracy.

So far this year, the GOP has passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country  that will make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities. With Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are stoking white people’s fears that a growing non-white population will usurp their dominance.

Yet while Biden and Democratic leaders are openly negotiating with holdout senators for Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure proposals, they aren’t exerting similar pressure when it comes to voting rights and elections. In fact, Biden now says he won’t take on the filibuster, which stands firmly in the way.

What gives? Part of the explanation, I think, lies with an outside group that has almost as much influence on the Democratic Party as on the Republican, and which isn’t particularly enthusiastic about election reform: the moneyed interests bankrolling both parties.

They fear that a more robust democracy would make it easier for the majority of Americans who aren’t wealthy to raise taxes on the wealthy to finance all sorts of things the majority may want, from better schools to stronger safety nets. 

So at the same time white supremacists have whipped up fears about nonwhites usurping their dominance, America’s wealthy have spent vast sums on campaign donations and lobbyists to prevent majorities from usurping their money.

They’ve already whipped up resistance among congressional Democrats to Biden’s plan to tax capital gains at 39.6% — up from 20% — for those earning more than $1 million. And they’re on the way to convincing Democrats to restore the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes, of which they’re the biggest beneficiaries.  

In recent years these wealth supremacists, as they might be called, have quietly joined white supremacists to become a powerful anti-democracy coalition.

Some wealth supremacists have backed white supremacist’s efforts to divide poor and working-class whites from poor and working-class Black and brown people, so they don’t look upward and see where most of the economic gains have been going and don’t join together to demand a fair share of those gains.

By the same token, white supremacists have quietly depended on wealth supremacists to bribe lawmakers to limit voting rights, so people of color continue to be second-class citizens. It’s no accident that six months after the insurrection, dozens of giant corporations that promised not to fund members of Congress who refused to certify Biden as president are now back funding them and their anti-voting rights agenda.

Donald Trump was put into office by this anti-democracy coalition. According to Forbes, 9 percent of America’s billionaires, together worth a combined $210 billion, pitched in to cover the costs of Trump’s 2020 campaign. During his presidency Trump gave both parts of the coalition what they wanted most: tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks for the wealth supremacists; legitimacy for the white supremacists.

The coalition is now the core of the Republican Party, which stands for little more than voter suppression based on Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and tax cuts for the wealthy and their corporations.

Meanwhile, as wealth supremacists have accumulated a larger share of the nation’s income and wealth than at any time in more than a century, they’ve used a portion of that wealth to bribe lawmakers not to raise their taxes. It was recently reported that several American billionaires have paid only minimal or no federal income tax at all.

Tragically, the Supreme Court is supporting both the white supremacists and wealth supremacists. Since Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined in 2005 and 2006, respectively, the court has been whittling away voting rights while enlarging the rights of the wealthy to shower money on lawmakers. The conservative majority has been literally making it easier to buy elections and harder to vote in them.

The Democrats’ proposed “For the People Act” admirably takes on both parts of the coalition. It sets minimum national standards for voting, and it seeks to get big money out of politics through public financing of election campaigns.

Yet this comprehensiveness may explain why the Act is now stalled in the Senate. Biden and Democratic leaders are firmly against white supremacists but are not impervious to the wishes of wealth supremacists. After all, to win elections they need likely Democrats to vote but also need big money to finance their campaigns.

Some progressives have suggested a carve-out to the filibuster solely for voting rights. This might constrain the white supremacists but would do nothing to protect American democracy from the wealth supremacists.

If democracy is to be preserved, both parts of the anti-democracy coalition must be stopped.

Joe Biden has a good chance of getting America back to where it was before the pandemic. Covid-19 is in retreat. So far, almost half of the adult population has been fully vaccinated. The economy is roaring back – still 7 million jobs short of where it was in January 2020 but on track to return to the starting gate by the end of the year. Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” is a major success.

But it’s not clear Biden will get America back to where it was before Trump. His initial slew of executive orders erased most of Trump’s executive orders, but he hasn’t yet demolished all of Trump’s cruel immigration policies. Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric is gone but Biden hasn’t repaired relations with China. Many of Trump’s tariffs are still in place. And even with a bare Democratic majority in the US Senate, there’s little chance Congress will repeal all of Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy.

What about Biden’s big plans to remake America? Depending on your point of view, they’re either on hold or stalled. He’ll likely get bipartisan support for over half a trillion dollars of new spending for “hard” infrastructure. That’s not nothing. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess what Senate Democrats will agree to on legislation covering childcare, the environment, and healthcare and education that can circumvent a Republican filibuster.

The biggest potential disaster concerns voting rights. As Republican-dominated states continue to restrict voting on the basis of Trump’s big lie about 2020 election fraud, and the Supreme Court signals its reluctance to get in the way, the only hope lies in what was supposed to be the Democrats’ highest priority – the For the People Act, setting minimum national standards for voting, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, restoring the potency of the old Voting Rights Act after the Court gutted it in 2013. But Senate Republicans won’t go along, and the refusal of a few Senate Democrats to alter the filibuster rule to allow them to be passed by a bare majority has condemned them to limbo.

Biden’s failure to make the right to vote his highest priority  – to visibly fight for it, make it his own personal cause, and go on the road to take that cause to the American people – is not only bad policy for the nation. It’s also bad politics. It may cost Democrats dearly in next year’s midterm elections, and beyond.

What Does Patriotism Really Mean?

Real patriotism is about paying taxes proportional to your wealth; paying your workers a living wage; ending the filibuster to protect voting rights; and reckoning with — not whitewashing — how racial oppression has shaped the nation, and taking restorative action to repair harm.

On Sunday, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin announced in an oped in the Charleston Gazette-Mail that he opposes the For the People Act. He also opposes ending the filibuster.

An oped in the most prominent state newspaper is as non-negotiable a position as a politician can assert.

It was a direct thumb-in-your-eye response to President Biden’s thinly-veiled criticism of Manchin last Tuesday in Tulsa, where Biden explained why he was having difficulty getting passage of what was supposed to be his highest priority – new voting rights legislation that would supersede a raft of new laws in Republican-dominated states designed to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters, using Trump’s baseless claim of voter fraud as pretext.

“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’” Biden asked rhetorically in Tulsa. “Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But we’re not giving up.”

Everyone who paid any attention to Senate politics knew he was referring to Manchin, as well as to Arizona Senator Kirsten Cinema, another Democratic holdout.

Manchin’s very public repudiation of Biden on Sunday could mean the end of the For the People Act. That opens the way for Republican states to continue their shameless campaign of voter suppression – very possibly giving Republicans a victory in the 2022 midterm elections and entrenching Republican rule for a generation.

As it is, registered Republicans make up only about 25 percent of the American electorate, and the percentage appears to be shrinking in the wake of Trump’s horrendous exit.

But because rural Republican states like Wyoming (with 574,000 inhabitants) get two senators just as do urban ones like California (with nearly 40 million), and because Republican states have gerrymandered districts that elect House members to give them an estimated 19 extra seats over what they’d have without gerrymandering, the scales were already tipped.

Then came the post-Trump deluge of state laws making it harder for likely Democrats to vote, and easier for Republican state legislatures to manipulate voting tallies.

Manchin says he supports extending the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to all fifty states. But that’s small comfort.

The original 1965 Voting Rights Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, on the dubious logic that it was no longer needed because states with a history of suppressing Black votes no longer did so. (Note that within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced it would implement a strict photo ID law, and Mississippi and Alabama soon followed.)

The efficacy of a new national Voting Rights Act would depend on an activist Justice Department willing to block state changes in voting laws that suppress votes and on an activist Supreme Court willing to uphold such Justice Department decisions. Don’t bet on either. We know what happened to the Justice Department under Trump, and we know what’s happened to the Supreme Court.

Besides, a new Voting Rights Act wouldn’t be able to roll back the most recent round of voter suppression laws from Republican states.

Without Manchin, then, the For the People Act is probably dead, unless Biden can convince one Republican senator to join senate Democrats in supporting it – like, say, Utah’s Mitt Romney, who has publicly rebuked Trump for lying about the 2020 election and has something of a reputation for being an institutionalist who cares about American democracy.

Yet given Trump’s continuing hold over the shrinking Republican Party, any Republican senator who joined with the Democrats in supporting the For the People Act would probably be ending their political career. Profiles in courage make good copy for political obituaries and memorials.

I’m afraid history will show that, in this shameful era, Republican senators were more united in their opposition to voting rights than Democratic senators were in their support for them.

The future of American democracy needs better odds.

Democrats are Running Out of Time

The political window of opportunity for Joe Biden and Democrats to deliver on their promises to the American people and pass the legislation the country needs, could close at any time. 

We must understand how rare it is that the Senate and the House and the presidency are all under the control of the Democratic Party.

That’s happened in only 4 of the past 28 years

The Democrats’ current Senate majority would end with the shift of a single seat from Democrats to the Republicans. That could happen even during this session of Congress. In 27 of the 38 Congresses since World War II, the party in control of the Senate has changed during the session.

Not to be morbid, but we also need to consider that this Senate has six Democratic senators, over the age of 70, who are from states where a Republican governor would be free to replace them with a Republican should a vacancy occur.

Five other Democratic senators are from states in which a Democratic vacancy would go unfilled for months until a special election was held to fill the seat — which itself would hand the G.O.P. control of the Senate at least until that special election.

It would be foolish to count on the Democrats increasing their numbers in the Senate or the House in the midterm elections of 2022. The president’s party rarely, if ever, picks up more seats during midterm elections. The last time a Democratic president has not lost Democratic seats in Congress in his first midterm election was 1934.

Meanwhile, state Republicans — who, not incidentally, control a majority of state governments — are proposing an avalanche of bills to make it harder for likely Democratic constituencies to vote, including people of color, young people, and low-income people. Some states, like Georgia, have already put these voter suppression measures into place.

And with these state Republicans in control of the upcoming once-in-a-decade redistricting process, we could see even more gerrymandering in these states — meaning an even greater likelihood that Republicans gain ground in the House.

If Joe Biden and the Democrats are going to accomplish what a majority of Americans want them to — such as raising the minimum wage, expanding health care, strengthening unions, raising taxes on big corporations and the wealthy, providing free public higher education, and strengthening voting rights with the For the People Act — they’ve got to get it done, now. 

That means Democrats have to get rid of the Senate filibuster and stop worrying about bipartisanship. 

The window of opportunity is already tiny. And it’s closing fast.

Republicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration.” The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”

Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks — they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.”

“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds.

In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28 percent more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31 percent during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25 percent from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.

To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by U.S. policies over the years, that’s driving migration in the first place.

But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.

Republicans continue to allege – without proof – that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented immigrants. Over the past six weeks they’ve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people, and Hispanic-Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.

To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill called the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering, and keeps dark money out of elections. It already passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.

On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.

The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent immigrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic restrictions on voting to counter these trumped-up crises.

The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law, and human rights.

Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.

This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.  

“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.

In his maiden speech at the State Department on March 4, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States.”

The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican Party, but there was no mistaking his subject.

“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.

People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.”

That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.

Not since the years leading up to the Civil War has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy.

In 1963, when the newly sworn-in Lyndon Baines Johnson was advised against using his limited political capital on the controversial issue of civil and voting rights for Black Americans, he responded: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”

America is again approaching a crucial decision-point on the most fundamental right of all in a democracy – the right to vote. The result will either be the biggest advance since LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, or the biggest setback since the end of Reconstruction and start of Jim Crow in the 1870s.

The decisive factor will be President Joe Biden.

On one side are Republican lawmakers who now control most state legislatures and are using false claims of election fraud to enact an avalanche of voting restrictions on everything from early voting and voting by mail to voter IDs. They also plan to gerrymander their way back to a House majority.

After losing the Senate and the presidency, they’re determined to win back power by rigging the rules againstlikely Democrats, disproportionately Black and brown voters. As a lawyer for the Arizona Republican party put it baldly before the Supreme Court, without such restrictions Republicans are “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”

On the other side are congressional Democrats advancing the most significant democracy reform legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights and voting rights laws – a sprawling 791-page “For the People Act” establishing national standards for federal elections.

The proposed law mandates automatic registration of new voters, voting by mail, and at least 15 days of early voting. It bans restrictive voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls – changes that studies suggest would increase voter participation, especially by racial minorities. It also requires that congressional redistricting be done by independent commissions and creates a system of public financing for congressional campaigns.

The legislation sailed through the House last week on a party-line vote. The showdown will occur in the U.S. Senate, where Republicans are determined to kill it. Although Democrats now possess a razor-thin majority, the bill doesn’t stand a chance unless Democrats can overcome two big obstacles.

The first is the filibuster, requiring 60 votes to pass regular legislation. Notably, the filibuster is not in the Constitution and not even in law. It’s a rule that has historically been used against civil rights and voting rights bills, as it was in the 1960s when LBJ narrowly overcame it.

Democrats can – and must — finally end it now, with their 51-vote majority.

But if they try, they face a second obstacle. Two Democratic senators – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema – have said they won’t vote to end the filibuster, presumably because they want to preserve their centrist image and appeal to Republican voters in their states. A few other Democratic senators are lukewarm to the idea.

Well, I’m sorry. The stakes are too high. If Democrats fail to enact the “For the People Act,” Republicans will send voting rights into retreat for decades. There’s no excuse for Manchin and Sinema or any other Senate Democrat letting Republicans pull America backwards towards Jim Crow.

And no reason Biden should let them. It’s time for him to assert the kind of leadership LBJ asserted more than a half-century ago on civil and voting rights.

Johnson used every tool at his disposal, described by journalist Mary McGrory as “an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages.”

He warned Georgia Senator Richard Russell, a dedicated segregationist, “Dick, I love you and I owe you. But….I’m going to run over you if you challenge me on this civil-rights bill.” He demanded his allies join him in pressuring holdouts. Senator Hubert Humphrey later recalled “the president grabbed me by my shoulder and damn near broke my arm.”

Historians say Johnson’s importuning, bribing, and threatening may have shifted the votes of close to a dozen senators, breaking the longest filibuster in Senate history and clearing the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights that could shape America for the next half century or more. Joe Biden is not LBJ, and the times are different from the mid-1960s. But the stakes are as high.

Biden must wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, “what the hell’s the presidency for?”

Unrigging the GOP’s Minority Rule

The Republican Party is shrinking. It’s lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight Presidential elections. Since Trump’s attempted coup, more Americans are abandoning it every day. 

What Happened to the Voting Rights Act?

This country has a long history of disenfranchising and suppressing the votes of people of color, particularly in the South. But in 2013 the voter suppression efforts of yesteryear came roaring back. That’s when the Supreme Court gutted key provisions in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those provisions had stopped states with histories of voter suppression from changing their election laws without an okay from the federal government. 

Let’s take a look at how that shameful decision has played out over the years, shall we?

Today’s voter suppression often takes the form of purging eligible voters from the rolls, cutting back early and absentee voting, closing polling places, and using strict voter ID requirements – disenfranchising voters of color at every turn.

Voter roll purges have become increasingly common. 

Officials purged nearly 4 million more names between 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008 — a 33 percent increase. Officials in states that used to be under federal oversight purged voters from the rolls at a rate 40 percent higher than those in states with no history of voter suppression.

As it turns out, Chief Justice John Roberts was dead wrong when he argued “things have changed dramatically” in the South.

Election officials in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia have all conducted illegal voter roll purges. In Virginia in 2013, nearly 39,000 voters were removed from the rolls when state officials relied on a faulty database – removing voters who had supposedly moved out of the state.

Even if you make it past a voter roll purge, you may get stuck in endlessly long lines to vote. 

Since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013, 1,688 polling places have been shuttered in states previously bound by the Act’s preclearance requirement. Texas officials closed 750 polling places. Arizona and Georgia were almost as bad. Not surprisingly, these closures were mostly in communities of color.

In Texas, officials in the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that gained the fewest Black and Latinx residents. In Georgia’s 2020 primary, 80 polling places were closed in Atlanta, home to Georgia’s largest Black population — forcing 16,000 residents to use a single polling place.

And even if you get to a polling place after standing for three hours to cast your ballot, you may end up being turned away because of a restrictive voter ID law. 

Republican lawmakers in 15 states have passed such laws since the Supreme Court’s shameful decision.

Texas Republicans put a voter ID law into effect almost immediately following the decision — a law that they had been prevented from passing in 2011 when the Voting Rights Act was still intact. That law has been struck down five times since it went into effect, with multiple courts finding it intentionally discriminates against Black and Latinx voters. A federal appeals court finally allowed a watered-down version that’s still one of the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country.

In Georgia, the state’s restrictive “exact match” ID law — requiring a voter’s ID to exactly match the name on their registration, down to any dots or dashes — allowed state officials to throw out 53,000 majority-Black voter registrations less than a month before the state’s tight 2018 gubernatorial race. Stacey Abrams, who would have been the country’s first Black woman governor, lost the election by just under 55,000 votes — after years of her rival Brian Kemp systematically suppressing the votes of people of color.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a court found that the state’s voter ID law “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision,” and struck the law down in its entirety. Imagine all we could accomplish with all the time, money, and resources that go into prolonged legal battles against these discriminatory laws that should never have seen the light of day in the first place.

Voter suppression is wreaking havoc on our electoral process. 

When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act seven years ago, it passed the buck to Congress to update it, but Senate Republicans haven’t lifted a finger. 

In December 2019, John Lewis presided over the House of Representatives to pass H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, now named the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act in his honor, to restore the Voting Rights Act and stop this pervasive voter suppression. It’s been collecting dust on Mitch McConnell’s desk ever since. He and his GOP colleagues think they can sit idly by as Republican state officials suppress the vote with no accountability.

They’re wrong. The people are ready to fight back against their agenda and build a 21st century democracy that is representative of and responsive to our growing, diverse nation.

If your vote didn’t count, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress it. Make sure you check your registration, stay up to date on your state’s rules for mail-in voting, find your polling place, and get involved with organizations on the frontlines of protecting the vote.

There’s no telling what we’ll be able to accomplish when we win the battle for voting rights.