“FROM the Civil War to the Jim Crow era, the filibuster has blocked popular bills to stop lynching, end poll taxes, and fight workplace discrimination... Now it is being used to block voting rights." That was Dr Martin Luther King in one of his speeches during the civil rights movement he spearheaded. The march last week was to reinforce his views on voting rights and his family didn't sugar coat their feelings, declaring: “The weaponization of the filibuster is racism cloaked in procedure and it must go.” Voting rights bills need a 60% supermajority in a US Senate split 50:50 because of the filibuster rule. The 10 to 12 Republican votes needed are not going to be forthcoming. For one thing, the bill would roadblock measures that Republican-controlled state legislatures hope will reduce Democratic voters.
Republicans have made it quite clear that the voting fraud they claim but can't find or prove will not keep Republicans from winning political office. Among a raft of legislations to discourage citizens, they have made it harder for voters in several states to get an absentee ballot. On technicalities, Texas this past week refused half the 900 applicants wanting an absentee ballot for a March local election.
In Arizona, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, the office that most states make responsible for elections, finds a Trump-endorsed Mark Finchem seeking the job. He went to Washington on January 6, 2021, to protest the election, and he maintains that the vote in Arizona was stolen. Finchem is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who campaigns, saying, “a whole lot of elected officials participate in a pedophile network in the distribution of children.” Less absurd but equally devout Trump supporters are running for secretary of state in Georgia and other closely contested states.
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