After nearly 13 hours of debate and an ill-fated attempt to change Senate rules, a voting rights bill intended to nullify new restrictions Republican state legislatures have imposed across the country died an ignominious death on the Senate floor.
Hardly a surprise, the bill’s demise ended a symbolic effort from Democratic leadership to get caught trying to pass a bill to strengthen American democracy even with failure guaranteed. Democrats had spent the better part of the last year nipping and tucking the legislation to both win over obstinate senators in their own party as well as break the inevitable filibuster blockade by Republicans to no avail. Among many other provisions, it would have restored key aspects of the Voting Rights Act essentially gutted by the Supreme Court in the infamous Shelby County decision.
Yet the final tally was still breathtaking: not a single Republican bothered to vote for the bill, including 16 GOP senators who, as recently as 2006, voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act. It’s fair to wonder how a cause once so universally cherished has devolved into yet another futile game of hyperpartisan political football.
For decades, Republicans were in lockstep with Democrats on protecting ballot access. They were for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before most Southern Democrats were. And over the years since, every time the Voting Rights Act needed reauthorization — in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006 — it was signed by a Republican president and supported by an overwhelming number of Republicans in Congress.
And yet, as Democrats attempt to keep their promise to repair a gaping hole in the Voting Rights Act left by the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, Republicans keep playing the role of spoiler.
It’s a role Sen. John Cornyn, Texas’ senior senator, seems to have relished this time around, jousting with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the Senate floor over legislation he eventually voted against, despite having voted for the 2006 VRA reauthorization.
A more careful look at his record on the issue, though, may help explain that seeming contradiction. In 2006, Cornyn joined other Republican senators in complaining about the law’s “preclearance” requirement, later struck down in Shelby, which required jurisdictions with a history of voter discrimination to submit changes to voting rules, or to legislative district maps, to the federal government before they took effect.
“It is disturbing when an act designed to ensure voters have full access to the ballot box has become a vehicle for partisan maneuvering,” Cornyn told the Dallas Morning News at the time.
Cornyn’s grievance centered on the fact that the formula used to lump Texas in with the jurisdictions that needed oversight dated back to before the law was even passed. Given how much more voting access Black and Latino Texans had gained since then, he and others reasoned, it was no longer fair to assume Texas still needed to pre-clear all its voting changes.
That argument might have held up had Texas not spent most of the past century flagrantly suppressing the votes of minorities, whom political leaders naturally viewed as threatening to the status quo of white hegemony. From all-white primaries to poll taxes to voter purges, Texas more than earned its spot on the list of jurisdictions requiring greater scrutiny. Our state — beginning when it was under Democratic control and continuing through 30 years of Republican dominance — was practically the reason the statute existed in the first place.
Still, the Supreme Court eventually agreed with Cornyn’s stance in 2013, naively reasoning in the landmark Shelby County v Holder decision that racism had so diminished in America that preclearance was no longer necessary. In its wake, Cornyn and other Republican senators called on Congress to update Section 5 of the VRA to restore preclearance, but in a way that accounted for progress in a state such as Texas.
“There’s universal support for the Voting Rights Act,” Cornyn told Politico then. “This is a fundamental part of who we are. But I think in fairness it does make sense to update it to reflect the current reality.”
Yet when a bipartisan group of lawmakers attempted to do just that in 2014 — including rewriting the preclearance statute so that only states with five or more voting rights violations over the past 15 years would require federal approval — it went nowhere. Cornyn played a key role in ensuring the bill’s fate, again warning against “any federal intervention in a selected handful of states.” And yet, even today, Cornyn’s aides insist there is a path to win him over on bringing back some form of oversight for jurisdictions that maintain clear patterns of discrimination.
“What he believes is if we updated the formula to use modern demographics and data, that a lot of the states, including Texas, would no longer be subjected to preclearance,” said Drew Brandewie, a Cornyn spokesman, adding that “no Democrat will work with him on that.”
We don’t share Cornyn’s confidence that Texas can suddenly be trusted to honor voting rights. And not just because Texas Republicans spent much of 2021 in special sessions working to pass another round of needless voting restrictions, including onerous ID requirements for mail-in voting that are already leading to a spike in rejected ballot applications across the state. The fact is, Texas has violated the Voting Rights Act in every single redistricting cycle since 1970 with racially gerrymandered districts.
Cornyn and other Republicans keep insisting that the Democrats’ new voting rights push is all about getting an advantage at the polls and they can’t understand why we should fix an electoral system that isn’t broken. But if it’s working so well, why did so many GOP-controlled states work overtime after the 2020 election to make it harder to vote?
There’s no good answer to that, which is probably why you shouldn’t hold your breath for Cornyn or any other Republican lawmaker to make a good faith effort to cosponsor a voting rights bill. So here’s a challenge for Cornyn: buttonhole some of your GOP colleagues, grab a few Democrats for good measure, and hash out a preclearance plan that can pass. It’s not enough to just pay lip service to voting rights.
Houston Chronicle
