#9 We’re Fighting for Free and Fair Elections

 This is the next of a new series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020. 

Please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, Our Unfinished Work, every two weeks.

Of all the things that dismayed us during Donald Trump’s four years of non-governance, especially disheartening was the lying. The number of untruths was staggering. The Washington Post documented 30,573 lies, and CNN underscored the most notable. Small lies and misrepresentations turned into huge ones, as Trump claimed Obama’s veterans’ health choice reforms, inflated the too high trade deficit with China, said for four years that his health care bill was about to be released, and falsely accused others to protect Putin. No crowd was ever small, no opponent noble, and no autocrat unimpressive.

It is no surprise that the small lies turned into big lies that have killed people. The insurrection of January 6 would never have happened without the election fraud Trump started perpetrating months before the election and continued until officer Brian Sicknick lay dying after the assault. Trump quietly received the vaccine, but he intentionally created the climate in which millions of Americans refused to receive it. Thus, he bears responsibility for those who will no longer be on the face of the earth.

Getting Pinocchio to recognize his nose is a lost cause. It is even a possibility that the Twitter-less Trump will continue to fade. Whatever level of super-spreading his serial untruths generate, we can battle back against the related made-up stories of Trumpian Republican Senators. Someone should tell Mike Pence that as insurrectionists screamed “hang Mike Pence” Ron Johnson was not worried about safety, since those invading the Capitol were not from Black Lives Matter or Antifa. Strangely Johnson had said in a previous statement that some of the insurrectionists were Antifa, wearing MAGA hats to blend in. He needs to settle on a single untruth, rather than trying out multiple stories.

The newest intentional prevarications have to do with Biden’s American Rescue Plan. Republicans deployed Senator John Barasso of Wyoming to say that only 9% of the package is devoted to “defeating the virus.” The artful wording leaves out efforts to revive the economy and help people whom the pandemic has crushed, bringing us to a total of 85% of the package. We can surmise that Barasso knows that already.

Looming over all this obfuscation is Trump’s big lie of election fraud. Even those Republicans who are ashamed of the events of January 6 are trying to breathe life into the fraudulent fraud claims being made in state legislatures across the country. In nearly every state, the Republican dream is for fewer people to vote! The sweeping Democratic response is HR 1, the For the People Act, which has passed the House. It will not get the necessary 60 votes to move forward in the Senate. It is a strong bill in its restoration of voting rights guarantees and its important tackling of campaign funding. It is not without its flaws, because it affords the federal government preeminence in matters of voter registration and the casting of ballots that heretofore have been left to the states. How would that have turned out when Donald Trump was president?

In the absence of a new federal law, there are wars being fought over voting in every state capital. The greatest Republican emphasis is on restricting mail in balloting, requiring further signature checks and limiting when and where polls are open. The number of separate proposals that would suppress voting is frightening. The outstanding Brennan Center is tracking them all. 

It is good to remember that the threats to us differ greatly depending upon the state. Thus, understanding which states to prioritize is an important part of this battle. For instance, some of these anti-democratic proposals outlined by the Brennan Center are in states where we have no chance of electing a Senator or President, such as Wyoming or Idaho. Even in these states we shouldn’t forget that local candidates or even Congressional candidates can be hampered by the suppressive actions.

Happily, scores of these proposals are in states with Democratic governors who will veto them if they make their way to her or his desk. The especially good news is this protection is available to us in battleground states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan and Virginia. The first three of these are providing us juicy opportunities to flip Senate seats in 2022.

Alas, there are 23 states where the vote-suppression can accelerate because suppressors control both branches of the state legislature and the Governor’s office. 

Of these, eight are especially significant in the voting rights battle. This is where our greatest immediate efforts should be directed. In these cases, Republicans who control the state capital are trying to restrict voting to give them a better chance of defending or picking up seats in the United States Senate to make Mitch McConnell majority leader once again. It is difficult to fathom anyone wanting such a thing.

These states include Ohio and Iowa, where Republican Senators Rob Portman and Charles Grassley will retire; Florida, Missouri, and South Dakota, where Donald Trump might intervene with his own candidate and provide us an opening; and, Arizona, Georgia, and New Hampshire, where we must defend the seats of Mark Kelley, Rev. Raphael Warnock and Maggie Hassan.

As the Brennan Center emphasizes the suppression strategies are many. They include but are not limited to eliminating “no excuse” mail in voting, eliminating or reducing ballot collection sites, expanding signature verification, reducing early voting (including after church on Sundays in Georgia), and expanding purging of the voter list. This is what you do when you are worried that you cannot win a free and fair election.

We can do these three things right now to fight back against these injustices.

1) Be Guided by the Best
	There is no one in the country who is doing better work to protect the right to vote than the Brennan Center for Justice. They have a range of e-newsletters that will keep you abreast of the challenges we must confront.  And, there is no one doing better on the work on the ground than Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight, battling against “Jim Crow in a suit and tie” in Georgia. They have expanded to Texas and are national leaders in the articulation of what ought to be done. It is easy to get their action alerts. For those who have it to give, these are both good places to send money.
2) Find Your Ideal State Partner
	It is always good to understand what is going on in your own state, so chicanery can be stopped. It is not as easy to identify the best partner in fighting suppression in Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, South Dakota, Arizona and New Hampshire (with Georgia well covered by Fair Fight. Among the promising suspects are Indivisible chapters, League of Women Voters chapters, and state Democratic Party organizations. Among the national organizations, All Voting is Local is worthy of examination.
3) Expand Corporate Support
	With Stacey Abrams’ pointed encouragement, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce has discouraged the Georgia State Legislature’s voter suppression proposals. The two key companies in that effort are Coca Cola and Home Depot, both interested in their own economic prospects and neither wanting to see Georgia continue its 150-year path of suppression. Thank the Georgia chamber by emailing their governmental affairs manager Lisa Sherman lsherman@gachamber.com In addition to commending her, you can beseech her to tell her story to other state Chambers.

White males comprise a lower percentage of voters than at any time in our nation’s history. Celebrate and defend the still growing diversity of our country!

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#8: Build Upon a Great Day

This is the next of a new series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020. 

If you are not already on our eblast list, please click here to be added. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, Our Unfinished Work, every two weeks.

We stood tall against a country-diminishing, soul-deadening presidency. We devoted ourselves to a huge and relentless campaign effort from the day Trump “won” in 2016 to Warnock and Ossoff’s victories in Georgia on January 5 of this year. We took back the House, then the Presidency, and then the Senate, and we never once lost our focus. So, let us not let it happen now. 

We can prevent that by reminding Robert Reich and all other regular counselors that our proposed significant increase in the federal minimum wage was not going to be found by the Senate parliamentarian to be a legitimate part of the budget reconciliation process. Even if Vice President Harris had overruled the parliamentarian, which she would not do in the first place, we would not have had the votes to sustain the Vice President’s action. Nor do we have the votes for the “nuclear option”, which would eliminate the sixty-vote requirement to close debate. We do not have the votes to pass a single payer health care system, or to pass the set of legislative ideas known as the Green New Deal.

What do we have? We have slim majorities in the House and Senate which are going to use the budget reconciliation process to pass a stimulus bill that will help us end the pandemic and rebuild our economy. They will go way beyond the $1400 stimulus payments. In one law they will bolster states and cities damaged by the recession, extend unemployment insurance, help to reopen schools and expand the earned income tax credit to further boost those with low incomes. They will increase our capacity to vaccinate at huge scale. They will provide help for folks who cannot pay their rent and do some major repairs to the Republican damaged Affordable Care Act. They will set the table for Biden and Harris for the next two years.

It will be a great day when Joe Biden signs the bill into law. It will be added to all the other good days that have unfolded since January 20. It turns out that what we have is a lot. What is surprising is not how little Joe Biden has accomplished in six weeks with the Senate split 50-50, but how much. Joe Biden has been able to erase nearly all of Trump’s executive orders because they were executive orders, and not laws. Trump had been chronically unable to get the 60 votes in the Senate to close debate. And we want to eliminate this provision, leaving us demagogue-vulnerable from this point forward?

Biden has started the rebuilding work with our allies. He has put people in cabinet positions who believe in the mission of the agencies they will run. The strides during the next two years will be great. The way that we will get done what needs to be done for our country is to expand our Senate and House majorities in November of 2022 and retain the Presidency in 2024. Right now, this looks like an excellent prospect, given that the other party is dominated by grumpy white men in an increasingly multi-racial country. With the deepest of irony, it turns out that Mitch McConnell would support Trump’s nomination after excoriating him for fomenting an insurrection. Are they really going to stay banded around the big lie and the big liar? Is that the plan? We will take that in a heartbeat.

There is a huge amount of work on the campaign side. What needs to be left to chance is nothing at all. But it would be helpful to remember that the number one thing that we can do to be successful on November 8, 2022 is to restore the country under Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ leadership.

The repairs to the Affordable Care Act and the several steps on climate change show that this Administration will be focused on these two matters from their first days to their last. Even though we have seen them as the most difficult things, we have as great a national consensus and an array of tools through which to move forward as we do in these three challenging areas.

Reproductive Freedom

Even though the pro-choice Presidential candidates have received more votes than their opponents in seven of the last eight elections, our situation in the Supreme Court has deteriorated and Roe v Wade itself is at risk. It is possible that Chief Justice John Roberts and either Justice Bret Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett would join the three liberal justices to defend the core of Roe v Wade as settled law. We can’t depend on this. If the court were to do the worst, the protection of the right to choose would vanish immediately in 22 states, including several that have passed “trigger laws” in anticipation. 

In addition to blocking additional states from passing anti-choice laws before the court rules, we can support the Biden/Harris efforts to remove federal restrictions advanced by Trump. Biden has already reversed the prohibition on US funded international organizations discussing the abortion option. The administration is working to remove similar restrictions on Planned Parenthood and other domestic organizations that receive federal dollars. There is also the more difficult but achievable restoration of Medicaid funding for abortions by eliminating the Hyde Amendment. 

Wealth Maldistribution

In America in 2020, the wealthiest 10% of households held nearly 70% of the assets (up from 60% twenty years ago) and the bottom 50% held 1.6% of the assets. The very rich got a big boost from the 2017 Trump tax “reform” and they are getting a further leg up during the pandemic. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are on this case. What they are seeking goes beyond the ongoing battle over the federal minimum age to the even higher calling--- a sustainable, living wage that will enable a family to house, feed, clothe, educate and secure health care for themselves.

Three provisions which will remain a part of the stimulus bill will have considerable impact on lower income populations in 2021. First, there are the $1,400 stimulus payments themselves. Getting less attention is the increase in the tax credit for children, and making it “refundable”, meaning it will be provided as a payment even if there is no tax liability to offset. There is also a major expansion of the earned income tax credit, long a central poverty-battling tool and which is also refundable.

There will be tax reform during Joe Biden’s first term because individual income tax rates and some tax breaks will expire in 2025, necessitating reauthorization before then. This gives Biden uncommon leverage in forcing Republicans to the table and will help him guarantee that tax reform decreases wealth maldistribution, rather than exacerbating it.

Immigration

Perhaps the most difficult challenge facing Biden in the Congress is finding a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. He is going to need some more Democrats elected in 2022 and some Republican Senators to get close to the necessary 60 votes. In the meantime, Democrats are more likely to get traction on three fronts, all of which have a bit of support from a small, beleaguered band of “moderate” Republicans.

Most likely is creation of the still absent statutory protection of Dreamers, including a proposed three-year path to citizenship. The Obama order providing protection only survived the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision on procedural grounds because of Trump’s fumbling of his executive order. There are also efforts underway to open a path for longer term agricultural workers and some proposals to increase employment visas. Importantly, the Biden administration is working hard to re-unite 600 children with their parents after they were separated at the border.

It would not be wrong while we focus on good public policy to take care of another matter. The Voter Protection Project has identified those who voted to ignore the Electoral College results who are the most politically vulnerable. They are starting with a $10 million fund to defeat their targets in 2022. We know what to do about that. 

Then, let us remember that we need independent advocacy to keep the above three opportunities squarely in front of Congress. These organizations will help us to achieve the most possible, rather than settling for easy compromises. We can sign up to make certain their strategies are clear to us and we are thus properly deployed, and we can decide to donate as well. Let’s do these three things.

1) Relentless Advocacy for Reproductive Freedom
	Planned Parenthood is a major advocate for reproductive freedom. Luckily, they have benefited greatly from donors responding to Trump’s relentless attacks on their programs. NARAL Pro-Choice is a great option for their political focus and relentlessness. They are out in front on overturning the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding of abortions. You can get regular briefings by texting NARAL to 21333.
2) Fighting Poverty One Program at a Time
	The Center for Law and Social Policy has the detailed understanding of complex federal anti-poverty programs that is the prerequisite for making these programs better. They can make certain that we take best advantage of the changes in the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit in the stimulus bill. They can also guarantee that we are ready for the next tax policy battle. Their e-news signup is right on their front page.
3) Coalescing Around Immigrant Rights
	The National Immigration Law Center has always been in the forefront of litigation on immigrant rights. They are intentionally expanding their work to strengthen immigration coalitions and to expand advocacy now that Congress is getting back to hearing immigration bills.

Joe Biden just announced a new deal between Johnson and Johnson and Merck to accelerate the production of the third vaccine. This means that every adult in the country can be vaccinated by the end of the May. It is this kind of immense breakthrough for which we worked for four years, and it is just the start of what we can get done.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington