(#4719) Voting rights protections take center stage this week in the senate.

      Today Chuck Schumer, the senate majority leader, will begin the process of getting a voting rights bill on the floor for a vote. Initially the vote will be on breaking the 60 vote threshold, otherwise known as the filibuster. Once the vote takes place and all 50 republicans vote against it as is widely predicted, because republicans do not want to protect voting rights and instead want to deny folks from the vote and gerrymander the heck out of our country, By gerrymander I mean draw districts that favor them at the expense of fairness and equity. Every 10 years after the US census new districts are drawn to reflect the changes to our states populations.
     With the republican party in charge of more than half the state legislatures they have passed many hundreds of bills to decrease voting opportunities and make it more difficult to have fair electoral districts. We democrats have tried to be fair in our apportionment of district inclusions and although some may not be perfectly fair they are at least consistent with a fair process. The republicans on the other hand are consistent in their blatantly obvious unfair and inequitable district line drawing. because not only are republican politicians corrupt in their actions their base voters are not holding them to account over it.
     So when the republican party votes down the bill Schumer presents the next phase is for a carve out of the filibuster for a solution. What that carve out looks like we will see this week. It may take longer for a final process to become clear but the hope is that enough of a motivation will be accrued to get the manchinema to agree to something that allows the voting rights protections bills to get an up or down majority vote. I am cautiously optimistic that something will happen but like all things manchinema the prospect of a deal coming from them is always full of disappointment. Yet the future of our democratic republic is on the line so I would hope they would choose to be patriots to democracy and help get a voting rights protections bill passed into law.