By Kenneth Tiven in Washington
“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% super majority 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.
Imagine a QAnon conspiracy theorist whose mission is making sure Donald Trump gets elected overseeing an election. Trump can! Finchem said: “We have to be a lot sharper the next time when it comes to counting the vote.” In a video, he said: “Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate.… They have to get tougher and smarter.” When Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota said on national television that, “The election was fair, as fair as we have seen. We simply did not win the election, as Republicans, for the presidency…”, the former president went ballistic, saying, “Is he crazy or just stupid? The numbers are conclusive, and the fraudulent and irregular votes are massive.”
Also Read: Donald Trump attempt to block his papers on Capitol attack fails
The Biden administration is getting little if any support from Congressional Republicans or from the Supreme Court for that matter, where the Trump appointees do not look favourably on his presidential power. By a 5 to 3 vote, the Court struct down a presidential order that required businesses with 100 or more employees to require staff to be vaccinated, or test weekly and wear a mask at work. Employees working at home or mostly outside or with a religious exemption were not subject to this. The six justice Republican majority ruled that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) did not have the authority to require vaccinations or masks and testing because the coronavirus is not specific to the workplace. Their conclusion: OSHA’s responsibility is only to make sure that conditions related to the workplace are safe.
Incredulous is the best characterisation of the dissent from Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. “COVID-19 poses grave dangers to the citizens of this country—and particularly, to its workers,” they wrote.
“The disease has by now killed almost 1 million Americans…. It spreads by person-to-person contact in confined indoor spaces, so causes harm in nearly all workplace environments. And in those environments, more than any others, individuals have little control, and therefore little capacity to mitigate risk…. So the administrative agency charged with ensuring health and safety in workplaces did what Congress commanded it to do: It took action to address COVID-19’s continuing threat in those spaces.”
The Supreme Court liberals did manage a majority joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh to decline to block the vaccination mandate for healthcare workers. In this case, the federal government has the right to mandate that institutions with federally insured Medicare and Medicaid patients can require their employees to not willfully spread a deadly virus to their patients.
Also Read:–Martin Luther King and Voting Rights
Why are Republicans and their allies so intent on not caring that 850,000+ people are dead in the US from the Covid-19 variants? You might also wonder why people have died believing conspiracy theories about vaccines when they all have had multiple vaccinations growing up as required by law. It suggests the power of ideological propaganda versus scientific fact. These are not the first politicians to use such tactics even if it kills more of their own voters than on the other side.
A theory is that it keeps people angry about the Biden administration and eager to vote in November and again in 2024 when Trump expects he can get nominated for run for another term. If he won, he’d be the second president to split his two terms with a presidential loss. Grover Cleveland, a Democrat served as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, getting two numbers because he served non-consecutive terms from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. Franklin Roosevelt was elected to four terms but only gets one number—32, because they were consecutive.
The Ohio Supreme Court got into the voting arena recently telling the state legislature that its maps for Congressional districts and for state legislative districts unfairly favoured the Republicans who had drawn it. This literally sends the Republican majority back to the drawing board. It was a narrow 4-3 decision finding the maps violated a voter-approved measure in 2018 that handed the power to draw political boundary lines to a commission, in hopes of stemming the practice of gerrymandering. One might ask why Republican legislators ignored the 2018 measure in the first place if it was the will of the Ohio voters.
—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels
Read the related article:-“I have a dream….”