6/23/21 The Election Bill is Dead -- Even with Manchin's Support

Democrats have been going for broke in an effort to pass a new voting rights act. But when all the dust settled on Tuesday, Democrats had lost the battle. It's just not clear whether they lost to the filibuster or to an inability to make the law appealing to Republicans as well.

Of course, it's hard to know whether any voting rights bill could get past Republicans, who are still milking Trump's Big Lie for votes and have no apparent intention of stopping.

It's a serious problem. In statehouses across the country -- at least Republican-led statehouses -- lawmakers are dead set on limiting voting rights to Black, Brown, and Democratic citizens. And the longstanding voting-rights legislation was all but nullified since SCOTUS took away, in 2013, the government's power to eyeball new voting laws in states with a history of suppressing those voters.

Republican legislators have out-bullied, out-planned, and outsmarted Democrats in the voting game for decades, winding up with an outsized proportion of Republicans in office compared with the percentage of actual citizens who are Republicans. We've been gerrymandered, handed inconvenient restrictions, and otherwise stonewalled from a full representation of the will of the people of this country.

You might think that the problem was the gadfly Senator Joe Manchin, DINO of West Virginia. Democrats were desperate, according to CNN commentator Joe Cilizza, whoever the hell he is, to get Manchin on their side because it's nice to say "50 Democrats voted for voting rights and 50 Republicans voted against."

Manchin supported the bill only if he could change it, and the fact that he's "with" the rest of the Democrats simply shows how dead the bill actually was. It makes Manchin's demands a moot point. He agreed! Huzzah!

At this point, we're barrelling into a midterm election that is already hamstrung for the majority of American voters.

Is it time to ditch the filibuster, without which this bill might have passed?

How did we get into this mess where Republicans determine the outcome of Senate bills, and also control the majority of the United States with a minority of voters?

Should Democrats get tough with the "my-way-or-the-highway" conservatives? And how would they do it?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/22/politics/senate-democrats-voting-bill/index.html?fbclid=IwAR0qrizsHFxmMuq70LF89im5CcnsbtlxMPcYqhPh3Kq-5rqjJW27JWv1Hck