First things first: the Oklahoma state House passed a bill late last week, HB 1674, that would immunize drivers who run over protestors. And they passed it at 12.30 in the morning, after meeting for 14 hours already! Because if you try to pass that bill in the light of day, people would be pissed off about it. And you know, not everyone actually accepts that "blocking the road" is completely unacceptable behavior! If you're constantly late getting everywhere or you're feeling like you have too much to do, you might feel that way, but rights don't disappear just because you're stressed or pressed for time, and I would say everyone has a right not to be run over while protesting. Now HB 1674 goes to the Oklahoma state Senate; Senate President Pro Tempore Greg Treat's phone number is 405.521.5632, while Senate Majority Floor Leader Kim David's phone number is 405.521.5590. Give them both a call and tell them HB 1674 is an absolute monstrosity and they should ensure its failure in the state Senate.
Meanwhile, our House passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, the most significant voting rights bill of the last few decades; now our Senate must act on it, hence People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to support voting rights in America by passing the For the People Act. The For the People Act would do a great many good works: it'd force disclosure of big campaign donors; it'd require states to use paper ballots; it'd make same-day and automatic voter registration the law of the land, it'd mandate 15 days of early voting in every state in America; it'd stop state legislators from redrawing Congressional districts to their party's liking; it'd stop states from using "Interstate Crosscheck"-type databases to deregister voters before proving they've done anything wrong; and it'd stop states from using "address-verification forms" to deregister voters who just so happen to live in communities of color. And what is the Republican response to this? That it's "evil" and a "Democrat power grab." And that's it. Don't take their crap anymore.
In other news, though no one's formally introduced the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act yet, it still merits a phone call to your Reps and Senators demanding its passage. As you know, our Supreme Court blew open a gaping hole in the Voting Rights Act with their Shelby County v. Holder ruling, by saying that singling out a few Southern states, as the Voting Rights Act does in Sec. 4(b), for extra scrutiny whenever they changed their voting rights laws was, well, unfair to those states. And now a lot of those Southern states are trying to curtail voting rights as we speak! The John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would replace the formula our Supreme Court found faulty with a new one, one which would single out any state or locality that's demonstrated a habit of suppressing votes. Republicans retort that "the South has changed," but that's rubbish -- the South has gotten cleverer at hiding its sins, that's all. Pass this bill, and we won't have to put up with that any longer.
Finally, pursuant to our goal in the previous paragraph, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to abolish the filibuster. Republicans will filibuster both the For the People Act and the John Robert Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act when they come before the Senate, and recent history suggests they won't suffer for it at the ballot box -- because Democrats only win elections when a) Republicans look incompetent as well as evil and b) when Democrats do good works. Seems to me Democratic politicians spend all their time waiting for a) when they should be doing b), because when they don't do good works, their most devoted voters stay home next election, and Republicans sweep back into power. Certainly ain't no one going into the ballot box in 2022 saying Democrats didn't do anything, but at least they preserved the sanctity of the Senate filibuster! Yeah, I'd prefer a talking filibuster, too, but they won't do that, so let's make them do the more painful thing instead.
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