WASHINGTON—The Democratic-run U.S. House may have passed a major voting rights bill on a party-line vote, but progressive groups aren’t letting Democratic President Joe Biden off the hook.
Instead, they tramped to Lafayette Park, just in front of the White House, on August 25 to demand he force voter protection and voting rights expansion through a balky evenly split U.S. Senate.
Marshaled by People for the American Way, the NAACP, and the League of Women Voters, several hundred people gathered in the newly reopened park to declare “STEP UP JOE,” in a large sign made of big single letters.
The issue is particularly important to workers, women, voters of color, young voters, and people with disabilities. Right-wing Republicans, most of them white nationalists, and backed by corporate interests, have filed more than 400 voter suppression bills in 48 states and approved repressive laws in 15.
Texas, the second-most populous state, which is on its way to becoming #16—piling even more restrictions on those it already had—is a particularly hideous example.
The white GOP majority and white right-wing GOP Gov. Greg Abbott are imposing their repression on an electorate that is 39.7% Latino/Latina, 12.9% Black, and 41% white only.
But the crowd in front of the White House worried about the whole U.S., not just Texas.
“Our democracy is in crisis,” declared League of Women Voters CEO Virginia Kase Solomon. “Voters are under an attack like we haven’t seen since the days of Jim Crow.
“President Biden guaranteed to make voting rights a priority but we have yet to see him use the full power of the executive branch” to turn that into a reality, she added.
“We have pleaded. We have asked politely. And we have received no joy” from the Oval Office, NAACP President Ben Jealous declared, before announcing leaders of the demonstration would undertake peaceful civil disobedience at its end. After denouncing “corrupt politicians” in Texas, Georgia and Arizona in particular “who give it (office) to themselves,” he too challenged Biden.
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