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Somber MLK Remembrances Expected as Voting Rights Effort Dies in US Senate

As the U.S. approaches the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., modern-day civil rights advocates are facing the reality that despite years of increasing public focus on racial injustice, they appear likely to fall short of their goal of improving minorities’ access to the vote.

Last week King’s family requested that celebrations of civil rights leader’s legacy be suspended this year, unless Congress passes legislation to expand voting rights in America.

Democrats have championed legislation that would give Washington a stronger say in how federal elections are administered in each of the 50 U.S. states. While the federal government does not control state-level elections, new federal requirements could affect them, because they are often conducted in tandem. Among other provisions, the two Democratic-sponsored bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, aim to undo laws passed by Republican-led states that limit methods and opportunities to cast ballots.

Democrats and many civil rights activists say the state laws will disadvantage minority voters, and they accuse Republicans of thinly veiled voter suppression. Republicans reject the charge, insisting their goal is to protect the integrity of elections and prevent voter fraud.

Stalled in the U.S. Senate for months, hopes for passing the Freedom to Vote Act appeared to be extinguished last week. Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, both Democrats, said that even though they support reforming election laws, they will not vote to change Senate rules in order to pass those reforms with Democrat-only backing.

A change in Senate rules would be necessary because no Republicans support the voting law bill. Under the chamber’s rules, Republicans can block most legislation even if a Democratic majority supports it.

On Friday, during a livestreamed interview with The Washington Post, Martin Luther King III bitterly criticized Sinema’s and Manchin’s position.

“History is not going to be judging … them in the way that perhaps they would want to be remembered. History is looking [them] dead in the face to say, ‘When it was time to make sure the democracy was preserved, what did you do?’” he said.

How did we get here?

Voting rights did not return to the top of the Democratic priority list overnight. The journey of civil rights issues to the forefront of public discourse in the U.S. has been years in the making.

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement after multiple highly publicized police killings of unarmed Black men between 2014 and 2019 galvanized many Americans behind the idea that the U.S. still had a long way to go to reach racial equality.

At the same time, the release of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, an effort to retell the history of the U.S. with more of a focus on the role of slavery, highlighted centuries-old racial inequalities in the U.S. So did a movement to tear down many monuments to the Confederacy, which fought to preserve slavery during the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65.

Pushback, sometimes violent

The increasing focus on racial justice in the U.S. has not come without a virulent reaction. White supremacist groups have become more active and vocal across the country. In 2017, a group of white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia. During related protests, one white supremacist activist drove a car into a group of counter-protesters, killing a young woman.

It was also difficult for many to disentangle the presidency of Donald Trump from the battle over racial inequality. Trump came to political power by pushing the falsehood that President Barack Obama, the first Black president, was not an American by birth, and that his presidency was therefore illegitimate. (By law, the president must be a natural-born U.S. citizen.)

Watch related video by Laurel Bowman:

Trump also called for the violent suppression of the Black Lives Matter movement, at one point sending in federal agents to break up a peaceful but boisterous protest near the White House. He also reportedly demeaned African and Black-led countries, asserting that the U.S. should not accept immigrants from them.

At the same time, a movement arose on the political right to restrict the teaching of racially sensitive topics in public schools. The themes protesters object to were short-handed as “critical race theory,” even though that subject is a relatively obscure area of legal scholarship that is never taught in elementary or high schools.

2020 election

The focus on voting rights has always been a major element of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, but it became especially acute in 2021, after minority voters played a major role in electing Joe Biden as president in the 2020 election and helped give Democrats control of the House and Senate.

Across the country, minority voters turned out in record numbers. This was especially true in states like Georgia, a Republican stronghold, where a campaign to register new minority voters and get them to the polls resulted in the state voting for a Democrat for president for the first time since 1992, and sent two Democrats to the Senate for the first time in a generation, giving the party control of that chamber.

After the election, the defeated President Trump insisted the election had been “rigged,” a falsehood that he has continued to repeat, and which many of his supporters, including many state legislators, have echoed.

In the months that followed, many Republican-controlled states passed restrictive new voting legislation that will make it more difficult for minority groups, including the non-English speakers and individuals with disabilities, to vote in future elections than it was in 2020, when measures to ease voting during the coronavirus pandemic helped drive record turnout.

In some cases, states did more than roll back pandemic-related voting accommodations. Some created new provisions allowing state legislatures to intervene in the certification of vote counts, established new rules allowing poll watchers to challenge individual voters, and put volunteer poll workers in danger of criminal prosecution for providing what, in years past, would have been routine voter assistance.

A common reaction

According to Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American Studies at Emory University, there is a long history in the United States of laws being changed after Black Americans exercise their freedom in a way that challenges power structures.

“What is happening is what always happens in America,” Anderson, the author of the New York Times bestselling White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, told VOA. “When we look at the 2020 election, where you had black folk coming out and voting, willing to stand in line for 11 hours to vote to fight for this democracy, the result of that was that Trump got removed from the White House and the Senate flipped. The response to that was a white rage policy of a series of voter suppression laws, and a series of laws that were about how to handle certification of elections.”

Not so, according to Republicans, who say they are fighting against federal overreach and accuse Democrats of attempting to tip the electoral scales in their favor.

“This effort by liberal Democrats to take power away from states to run elections is not about enfranchising voters – it’s about shifting power to the advantage of the liberal Democratic agenda,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently tweeted.

Amid the acrimony and on the eve of what seems sure to be a more somber Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, Anderson said she is sure the fight for voting rights — and civil rights more broadly — will continue.

“We have an incredibly engaged civil society that is fighting for this democracy,” she said. “We have folks who are litigating against these voter suppression laws. We have folks who are registering folks to vote jumping through all of the hurdles. We have folks who are providing citizenship training school. … It is that civil society that has been just absolutely instrumental in fighting for American democracy.” 
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Ohio Supreme Court Rejects Second GOP-drawn Election Map

Ohio’s Republican-drawn congressional map was rejected by the state’s high court Friday, giving hope to national Democrats who had argued it unfairly delivered several potentially competitive seats in this year’s critical midterm elections to Republicans. 

In the 4-3 decision, the Ohio Supreme Court returned the map to the Ohio General Assembly, where Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers, and then to the powerful Ohio Redistricting Commission. The two bodies have a combined 60 days to draw new lines that comply with a 2018 constitutional amendment against gerrymandering. 

The commission was in the process of reconstituting so it can redraw GOP-drawn legislative maps that the court also rejected this week as gerrymandered. That decision gave the panel 10 days to comply. 

With February 2 and March 4 looming as the filing dates for legislative and congressional candidates, respectively, the decisions have raised questions of whether the state’s May 3 primary may have to be extended. 

Ohio Republican Party Chair Bob Paduchik called the situation a mess, criticizing the Ohio Supreme Court for giving the commission less than two weeks to come up with new legislative maps. 

“That’s a lot to dump on a commission with a very short period of time,” he said during a forum at the City Club of Cleveland on Friday. “It’s hard to say what’s going to happen.” 

Opinions

Justices chastised Republicans in both decisions for flouting the voters’ wishes and the Constitution and directed them to move with haste. 

Writing for the majority, Justice Michael Donnelly wrote, “(T)he evidence in these cases makes clear beyond all doubt that the General Assembly did not heed the clarion call sent by Ohio voters to stop political gerrymandering.” 

Donnelly and the court’s other two Democrats were joined by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a moderate Republican set to depart the court because of age limits at the end of the year. 

The court’s three other Republicans — including Justice Pat DeWine, son of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, a named plaintiff in the cases — dissented. 

They said it was unclear how it should be determined that a map “unduly favors” one party over another. 

“When the majority says that the plan unduly favors the Republican Party, what it means is that the plan unduly favors the Republican Party as compared to the results that would be obtained if we followed a system of proportional representation,” the dissent said. 

They explained that the U.S. has never adopted a system that requires congressional seats to be proportionally distributed to match the popular vote, nor does Ohio’s Constitution require it. 

In her separate opinion, O’Connor said voting-rights and Democratic groups that challenge the maps never argued strict proportionality was required. 

“The dissenting opinion’s dismissive characterization of all the metrics used by petitioners’ experts as simply being measures of ‘proportional representation’ is sleight of hand,” she wrote. “No magician’s trick can hide what the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates: the map statistically presents such a partisan advantage that it unduly favors the Republican Party.” 

Lawsuits

Friday’s decision affects separate lawsuits brought by the National Democratic Redistricting Commission’s legal arm, as well as the Ohio offices of the League of Women Voters and the A. Philip Randolph Institute. The groups calculated that either 12 or 13 of the map’s 15 districts favor Republicans, despite the GOP garnering only about 54% of votes in statewide races over the past decade. 

Republicans had defended the map — which was pushed through the approval process in a flurry — as fair, constitutional and “highly competitive.” 

Voting rights advocates and Democrats praised the court’s ruling, their second victory this week. 

Ohio and other states were required to redraw their congressional maps to reflect results of the 2020 census, under which Ohio lost one of its current 16 districts because of lagging population. 

 
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US House Panel Subpoenas Social Media Firms in January 6 Attack Probe

The U.S. House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol subpoenaed Meta, Alphabet, Twitter and Reddit on Thursday, seeking information about how their social media platforms were used to help fuel misinformation in a failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 

“Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps – if any – social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence,” the House Select Committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, said in a statement. 

“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions.” 

The subpoenas are the latest development in the panel’s investigation into the causes of the attack on the Capitol by then-President Donald Trump’s supporters, and the role played by Trump, who has pushed false claims that he lost a rigged election to Joe Biden. 

The committee has issued more than 50 subpoenas and heard from more than 300 witnesses. It is expected to release an interim report in the summer and a final report in the fall. 

Spokespeople for the four social media companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Social media platforms were widely blamed for amplifying calls to violence and spreading misinformation that contributed to the January 6 attempt to violently overturn the election results. 

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey were grilled by lawmakers last March in a hearing on misinformation about the role of their companies in the Capitol riot. 

In a letter sent this week to Zuckerberg, Representative Thompson said that “despite repeated and specific requests for documents” related to Facebook’s practices on election misinformation and violent content, the committee had still not received these materials. Letters to the other three CEOs contained similar criticisms. 
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Democrats Eye Major Rules Change for Debate on Voting Rights

U.S. President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers are maneuvering this week to alter Senate rules to allow for debate on key voting rights legislation that has been blocked for months by Republicans. The showdown is the culmination of a fierce debate over the democratic process. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more.
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Democrats Consider Changes to US Senate Filibuster Rule

U.S. President Joe Biden was a longtime supporter of the Senate supermajority rule known as the filibuster, but with the chamber’s Republican minority blocking parts of his agenda, the former senator said this week he is open to altering the rule in order to try to enact voting rights legislation.

The 100-member Senate is currently divided evenly between members who caucus with Biden’s Democratic Party and members of the Republican Party.

Democrats can pass bills using the tiebreaker vote Vice President Kamala Harris can cast when necessary. But before a bill can be put to a simple majority vote, there must first be a move to end debate on the measure, which under Senate rules requires the support of 60 senators.

The procedural hurdle has its critics who argue it is anti-democratic and prevents the federal government from addressing problems facing the nation. But supporters say it forces the members of the Senate to find consensus on those matters and prevents the party in power from enacting sweeping changes.

Democratic Party leaders say they want to make voting rights legislation a category that needs only a simple majority support in order to move to a final vote and that they plan to pursue that change in the coming days.

Left uncertain is whether they have enough support among their caucus to achieve that goal. Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have expressed opposition, citing concerns that doing so would give Republicans an open path to do whatever they want should they reclaim a majority in the next round of elections in November.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the body’s top Republican, has also warned that if Democrats do away with the filibuster, his side would find other ways to slow action in the Senate.

Some information for this report came from Reuters. 
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January 6 Panel Requests Interview With Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy

The House panel investigating the U.S. Capitol insurrection requested an interview and records from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday, shifting their investigation to a top ally of former President Donald Trump in Congress. 

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democratic chairman of the panel, requested that McCarthy provide information to the nine-member panel regarding the violence that took place last January and his communications with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days prior to the attack.

“We also must learn about how the President’s plans for January 6th came together, and all the other ways he attempted to alter the results of the election,” Thompson said in the letter. “For example, in advance of January 6th, you reportedly explained to Mark Meadows and the former President that objections to the certification of the electoral votes on January 6th ‘was doomed to fail.'” 

The request seeks information about McCarthy’s conversations with Trump “before, during and after” the riot, with lawmakers seeking a window into Trump’s state of mind from an ally who has acknowledged repeated interactions with the then-president.

The committee also wants to question McCarthy about communications with Trump and White House staff in the week after the violence, including a conversation with Trump that was reportedly heated. 

The committee acknowledged the sensitive and unusual nature of its request as it proposed a meeting with McCarthy on either February 3 or 4.

“The Select Committee has tremendous respect for the prerogatives of Congress and the privacy of its Members,” Thompson wrote. “At the same time, we have a solemn responsibility to investigate fully the facts and circumstances of these events. 

A request for comment from McCarthy’s office was not immediately returned.

McCarthy attracted the committee’s attention through his public characterizations after the riot of his private discussions with Trump. Thompson’s letter cites multiple statements and interviews in which McCarthy described his interactions with the president, including a CBS interview in which McCarthy said, “I was very clear with the president when I called him. This has to stop, and he has to go to the American public and tell them to stop this.” 

One of his Republican colleagues, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, has said McCarthy told her that Trump told him, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” 

The Republican leader is the third member of Congress the committee has reached out to for voluntary information. In the past few weeks, Republican Representatives Jim Jordan and Scott Perry were also contacted by the panel but have denied the requests to sit down with lawmakers or provide documents.

The panel, comprised of seven Democrats and two Republicans, has already interviewed more than 300 people and issued subpoenas to more than 40 as it seeks to create a comprehensive record of the January 6 attack and the events leading up to it.

The committee says the extraordinary trove of material it has collected — 35,000 pages of records so far, including texts, emails and phone records from people close to Trump — is fleshing out critical details of the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries, which played out on live television.

Thompson told The Associated Press in an interview last month that about 90% of the witnesses subpoenaed by the committee have cooperated, despite the defiance of high-profile Trump allies like Meadows and Steve Bannon.

Lawmakers say they have been effective at gathering information from other sources in part because they share a unity of purpose rarely seen in a congressional investigation. 

 
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White House Urges Continued Mitigation Efforts Amid Omicron Surge

The White House COVID-19 response team on Wednesday reminded Americans of the continued need to slow the omicron variant’s spread despite its decreased severity and announced new efforts to help keep schools open.

As the omicron variant sweeps across the U.S., Dr. Rochelle Walensky emphasized that wearing masks, getting vaccinated and undergoing COVID-19 testing when necessary are the best strategies to help lower cases of the virus.

Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the omicron variant accounted for 98% of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Earlier this week, the U.S. set a record for the number of daily infections at nearly 1.5 million, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

“All of us must do our part to protect our hospitals and our neighbors and reduce the further spread of this virus,” Walensky said.

The White House team also announced that the Biden administration would distribute 10 million tests to schools across the country each month to ensure they remain open, more than doubling the testing volume from last year.

Although the omicron variant is highly transmissible, it remains less severe than the delta variant, with a decreased risk of hospitalization and death.

Walensky, citing a recent study comparing the two variants, said omicron infections were associated with a 91% reduction in the risk of death and a 74% reduction in the risk of ICU admission.

She also said that infections with the variant had a 53% reduced risk of symptomatic hospitalization.

More hospitalizations

While the risk of hospitalization remains low, the “staggering rise in cases” has increased the country’s number of hospitalizations, according to Walensky.

Nonetheless, she said, patients infected with omicron are experiencing 71% shorter hospital stays than those infected with the delta variant.

On average, omicron patients are hospitalized for about 1.5 days and 90% are expected to be discharged in three days or less.

As the surge continues, Walensky reiterated that cases of the variant are expected to peak in the coming weeks. She also said deaths have increased, with more than 2,600 reported by John Hopkins on Wednesday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease expert, said the country would not be able to eliminate or eradicate COVID-19, but would “ultimately control it.” As the virus becomes endemic, it is likely that “virtually everybody is going to wind up getting exposed and likely get infected,” he said.

However, he added, this does not mean that vaccinations or preventative measures are ineffective or pointless. Fauci clarified that getting vaccinated and staying up to date with booster shots will prevent serious illness from the disease.

“If you’re vaccinated and if you’re boosted, the chances of your getting sick are very, very low,” Fauci said.

To help battle the current surge, the White House team stressed that mitigation efforts remain critical, including wearing a mask. While N95 masks have been shown to be the most effective in resisting airborne transmission of the virus, the CDC still recommends that, for the time being, people choose the mask that is right for them, and that wearing any well-fitting mask is better than no mask.

“We want to highlight that the best mask for you is the one that you can wear comfortably,” Walensky said.

Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, was asked about finding masks and said the administration is “strongly considering options to make more high-quality masks available to all Americans.”

As for schools, the team said that, along with increased testing, vaccination and other mitigation efforts are the keys to keeping students in the classroom.

Walensky stated that with pediatric vaccines now available, schools should be able to continue operating as planned. She also reminded reporters that 99% of schools remained open in the fall during a surge in the delta variant.

“One of the best things we can do is get our children and our teenagers vaccinated,” she said.
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Amid Partisan Rancor, US Looks to 2022 Midterm Elections

As of Wednesday, there were 300 days until the next federal election in the U.S., when voters will cast ballots for all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and one-third of the members of the Senate, with enormous consequences for the second half of President Joe Biden’s four-year term in office. 

While it may seem to people outside Washington that it’s too soon to begin thinking about an election that far away, there is little question that key figures in Washington are already weighing their every move with an eye on how it might affect voters’ feelings in November. 

That applies particularly to Biden, who is struggling with an approval rating that has been hovering between 40% and 45% for several weeks as the coronavirus pandemic rages and inflation drives up the cost of living for everyday Americans at a pace not seen in nearly four decades.

Called a “midterm election” because it takes place at the midpoint of the president’s four-year term, the results are usually affected heavily by public perceptions of the president.

“There’s no reason to think that the midterm elections in November of this year will be anything other than what they usually are, and that is a referendum on the performance of the president and the president’s party,” William A. Galston, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program, told VOA.

Control of Congress at stake

Control of both the House and Senate is very much in play. Democrats have nominal control of both chambers but are severely constrained in enacting their proposals because of a 50-50 split in the Senate. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris is able to cast tie-breaking votes, but the body’s filibuster rule allows Republicans to block most legislation from coming to a vote in the first place.

In the House, Democrats hold a slim 222-212 majority, with one seat vacant. Republicans are favored to win enough seats to take over the House in November.

In the Senate, the likely result is unclear. Of the 34 seats that are up for election this cycle, 20 are held by Republicans and 14 by Democrats. The overwhelming majority are considered “safe,” meaning that the incumbent is likely to be reelected. The six races generally considered competitive are split evenly, with three held by Republicans and three by Democrats.

As difficult as it presently is for Biden to force his agenda through Congress, the loss of control of either the House or the Senate to Republicans would all but guarantee a shutdown of his legislative agenda in the second half of his term.

Referendum on the president

Historically, midterm elections are tough on the party of the president. In all but three of the midterm elections since the 1861-65 Civil War, the party of the incumbent president has lost seats in the House.

“The best predictor of how a party is going to do is the incumbent president’s job approval rating,” Charlie Cook, the founder of the Cook Political Report, told VOA. “And the more under 50% it is, the tougher it is. So if you’ve got a president that’s at 42%, or 43%, as President Biden is, that’s not a good thing [for Democrats].”

“Sometimes you can oversimplify things in politics, but I think midterms benefit from oversimplification,” said Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“Historically speaking, unless there’s some sort of big outside circumstance or extraordinary circumstance, you would not expect an unpopular president’s party to do well in a midterm,” Kondik told VOA. “And so I think what we could say from the vantage point of January is that Biden’s numbers need to get better or Democrats are in real danger of losing particularly the House and also the Senate.”

Controversy possible

Absent some grand unifying event that inspires Americans to cross political boundaries, the 2022 election will take place in an atmosphere of extreme partisan rancor. After the 2020 election, in which former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the presidency had been stolen from him, many states passed controversial new election laws that could make contested outcomes more likely and more challenging to resolve.

“If there’s a close election in a major race — let’s say it’s a Senate race that could determine control of the Senate — will the losing side be willing to accept the legitimacy of the outcome or be convinced that the process was rigged in some way against it?” asked Rick Pildes, an election law expert and the Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York University School of Law. “We’re in a culture of tremendous distrust in advance [of the election] on both sides of the spectrum.”

Pildes pointed out that the situation is exacerbated by one aspect of the U.S. election system that is notably different from most other democracies.

“In the U.S., we do not have independent institutions to oversee and administer our elections, unlike in a lot of democracies,” he told VOA. “We have partisan elected officials … administering most of the election process and there is great concern now that the losers will convince themselves — in a close election, particularly if the other party’s elected figures are in control of the process — that something about the process was corrupt.”

If there is controversy, it will most likely be in a small handful of races, said Galston of the Brookings Institution.

“At this point, so many of the elections occur in jurisdictions that are dominated by one party or the other that we may not see that many close elections, either at the congressional district level or at the state level,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to reach anything like the intensity that we saw after the presidential election of 2020.”

Abortion ruling as wild card

One event that could have a significant impact on the election is an anticipated ruling on a controversial state abortion law, expected from the Supreme Court in the early summer, according to Kondik of the University of Virginia. The ruling will decide if states are free to enact far more restrictive abortion laws than Supreme Court precedent has allowed.

“I think one big issue to watch is abortion — if, in fact, the Supreme Court allows states to heavily restrict abortion or restrict abortion more than they’re able to do now,” he said. “So, if you’re looking for an issue to come to the forefront in the 2022 election, that would be one to watch. Abortion is a very polarizing and important issue in American politics.”

With support for limiting or even abolishing abortion rights concentrated among Republicans, and most Democrats supporting expansive access to abortion services, a decisive ruling that moves the needle either way could galvanize voters, driving more voters from one or both parties to the polls in greater numbers.
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