Category: Politics and American Democracy

Democrats have control of the House and Senate, and they want to use it to reform elections and make it easier to vote. But first, they’ll have to get past Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Congressional Democrats are pushing a sweeping package of voting rights, gerrymandering, election, campaign finance and ethics reforms, called the For the People Act. It’s listed as H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate, signifying that it is Democrats’ top legislative priority. For the past two decades, every bill labeled both H.R. 1 and S. 1 has become law.

If the For the People Act is to pass, though, Democrats will need to surmount the one obstacle clogging up almost all legislation that doesn’t directly affect the federal budget: the filibuster. Democrats hold only 50 votes ― plus Vice President Kamala Harris’ to break ties ― and Republicans could easily use the filibuster to prevent voting reform. McConnell, who previously called the legislation “socialism” and a “power grab,” blocked it from a Senate vote in 2019.

Debate over the filibuster ― that it is an archaic tool used mostly throughout history to block civil rights laws and is now preventing the government from operating as voters want it to ― is already at a boiling point. If the filibuster winds up killing democracy reform, it may be what finally drives Democrats to turn around and kill the filibuster.

Former President Barack Obama, Democratic lawmakers and activists are already paving the way to make that argument. At the funeral for civil rights hero and Democratic Rep. John Lewis last summer, Obama called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic” and said that if Republicans dared to filibuster legislation to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (a bill that is now named for Lewis), Democrats should not hesitate to eliminate the filibuster to pass the bill.

The same could be argued of the For the People Act: Lewis and his staff wrote the entire first section, which greatly expands voting rights and limits voter suppression tactics.

These reforms are all the more vital now, Democrats argue, as Republicans seek to pass new voter restrictions at the state level, spurred on by former President Donald Trump’s voter fraud lies. If Democrats don’t pull off these reforms now, they could be too late.

They intend that the For the People Act become law. Whatever it takes.

“It’s all systems go to try to make that happen,” said Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), the bill’s chief sponsor in the House.

The Fight To Fix Democracy

Democrats didn’t expect to gain unified control of Congress after the voting ended on Nov. 3. Though Joe Biden had won the White House, they were two seats short of a 50-seat majority in the Senate with two runoff races in Georgia to be decided on Jan. 5. Then they won both runoff races, putting them in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Now, they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to enact their agenda. Just as when Obama came into office in 2009, the main obstacle is McConnell’s use of the filibuster to block any and all legislation that he can.

There was intense discussion around eliminating or reforming the filibuster back then, but that nascent effort could not overcome the hesitancy from old-line Democratic senators who did not understand that the Senate they had served in for decades had changed since the 1970s era of consensus.

A coalition did emerge around filibuster reform in 2010, which ultimately led then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to kill the filibuster for lower-court judicial nominees in order to overcome a Republican-led blockage in 2013. After Trump became president in 2017, McConnell ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in order to fill the seat he’d held open for more than a year after Justice Antonin Scalia died.

The groundwork laid down a decade ago gives today’s filibuster reform advocates a running start. The anti-filibuster coalition Fix Our Senate launched in 2019 with backing from some groups involved in the 2010 effort, including the Communications Workers of America, Common Cause and Public Citizen, as well as many new progressive and issue-oriented partners like Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress.

Fix Our Senate and the Declaration for American Democracy, a coalition of good government and progressive groups whose membership overlaps with that of Fix Our Senate, are now pressuring Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other key Democrats to pass the For the People Act no matter what.

Fix Our Senate has already run a full-page ad in The New York Times calling on Schumer to end the filibuster. More ads are planned in states represented by Democratic senators who are not currently on board with ending the filibuster, like Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.).

The Declaration for American Democracy intends to target its messaging in seven states: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. These states fall into four different but sometimes overlapping categories. There are the states with Democratic senators who are currently opposed to ending the filibuster (Arizona and West Virginia), states with potentially swayable Republican senators (Alaska and Maine), states whose election systems were attacked by Trump as part of his campaign to overturn the election (Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania), and states with moderate House Democrats who backed the For the People Act (Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Pennsylvania and Virginia).

The For the People Act “is shaping up to be a big flashpoint in the fight to eliminate the filibuster because it is both critically important and also absolutely clear that it will be filibustered,” said Eli Zupnick, spokesman for Fix Our Senate. He added, “If Democrats go two years without taking any steps to fix our democracy and tackle corruption and protect voting rights, this will be a failure. This will be a failure of two years.”

The fight in Congress over the For the People Act will begin in earnest in the coming weeks. The House plans to pass the legislation the week of March 1. After that, the Senate will hold hearings on the bill and likely bring it to the floor for a vote.

And that is where the bill is expected to be blocked by a Republican filibuster and become a flashpoint in the fight to change Senate rules.

The Democrats’ Plan For Passage

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is the lead co-sponsor of the For the People Act in the Senate, alongside Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and also the leading proponent of eliminating the filibuster. He is insistent that the bill become law. To do so, it must either gain support from 10 Republican senators, an unlikely feat, or overcome the opposition to eliminating the filibuster expressed by Manchin and Sinema.

“It has to pass in some way,” Merkley said, “but it could pass in multiple ways.”

One way to try to gain Republican support, Merkley suggested, is to put the bill on the Senate floor open to all germane amendments. Most bills hit the floor with a rule drafted by the majority party limiting amendments and debate. Showing openness to the other party’s amendments and debate is rare these days and might earn buy-in from the other side.

If that doesn’t work, then Merkley thinks Democrats need to immediately examine any and all ways to change the filibuster rule. This could include lowering the threshold for overcoming the filibuster from 60 to 55 votes, eliminating the 60-vote threshold but providing for a talking filibuster, or entirely ending the filibuster.

A majority party changing the rules to pass its top-priority legislation wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, Merkley noted. In fact, Republicans altered the rules for budget reconciliation in 2015 after winning control of the Senate. This change allowed them to pass their own H.R. 1 and S. 1 in 2017, a package of tax reforms and upper-income and corporate tax cuts.

Failure to pass the For the People Act wouldn’t just mean that Democrats failed to enact the centerpiece of their agenda; it would also clear the way for a new wave of state voter suppression measures driven by Trump’s election fraud lies.

Right now, Republican-controlled state legislatures are pushing bills to limit early and absentee voting, purge voters from the rolls, and toughen voter ID requirements. The For the People Act would ban almost all of these schemes to make it harder for certain communities to vote.

“Here we are with a very, very slim majority, a majority that we’ll probably lose if voter suppression goes on steroids as seems to be the path that so many state legislatures are on right now,” Merkley said. “And so this is the critical moment to pass this bill.”

Furthermore, the bill would ban partisan gerrymandering by requiring states to use independent, nonpartisan redistricting panels to draw House district lines. Given the extent of current Republican control of state legislatures, which exists thanks to district lines gerrymandered back in 2011, the Democratic House majority could theoretically be gerrymandered out of existence ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Passing the For the People Act quickly could potentially prevent this as well as blocking new voter suppression laws.

What remains to be seen is how many filibusters it will take to create the necessary pressure to tackle the filibuster. The For the People Act may be the first bill to be blocked in this Congress, but as long as there’s a filibuster, it won’t be the last.

House Democrats expect to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act this spring as well. If Republicans block that, too, they’ll be sending a clear symbolic message: that the GOP, fresh off trying to overturn an election by disenfranchising Black voters, is ready to stomp on Lewis’ legacy.

Democrats will have to decide whether to let Republicans block these bills, which will allow further disenfranchisement of Black voters, or to pass the legislation they ran on.

AMERICUS, Ga.— Over the past three decades, as the state around him turned ever more resolutely Republican, W. McCall Calhoun Jr. remained an outspoken and unwavering liberal. He gave money to Democrats, ran for office as a Democrat and zealously championed Democratic policies in social circles that were far from sympathetic. If friends admitted they voted for Donald Trump, his reaction could be blistering.

“He was hard core, there’s no doubt about it,” said Dr. Michael Busman, a physician who has known Calhoun for years. “He wouldn’t even want to talk to you if you were Republican.”

But last year, as the progressive movement in Georgia was on the cusp of historic electoral triumph, Calhoun, a small-town lawyer whose family had long roots in the state, suddenly abandoned the Democrats. And not only that, he pledged to kill them.

“I have tons of ammo,” Calhoun wrote on Twitter three months before storming the U.S. Capitol with a pro-Trump mob. “Gonna use it too — at the range and on racist democrat communists. So make my day.”

The sudden conversion of Calhoun, who is now in federal custody, was baffling to many who knew him. Indeed, Calhoun’s story seemed a walking embodiment of Georgia’s contradictions: a state where a rising multiracial coalition of voters sent two Democrats — a Black preacher and a Jewish millennial — to the Senate in January, but where thousands of voters also elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, vanguard of an incendiary brand of hard-right politics.

​Some Black residents of Americus, Calhoun’s hometown, were not shocked that a person so worldly could end up doing something like this. “The Jekyll and Hyde effect,” said the Rev. Mathis Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local NAACP chapter. He knew Calhoun, who gave donations and regularly bought tickets to the group’s annual banquet. But Wright suggested that the racism deep at the root of Georgia’s history was still very much alive, even if white people, including some of those who saw themselves as progressive, did not want to admit it. “What President Trump did was allow it to bud and to grow,” he said. “A lot of people who had been suppressing it no longer felt that they had to suppress it.”

Before it fell away, Calhoun’s white progressivism had a homegrown flavor, steeped in Georgia’s history, countercultural currents and higher education system. He preached criminal justice reform and broadcast his support for Hillary Clinton.

Then came his abrupt turn, and a headlong descent into some of the darkest places in Georgia history. He peppered his social media posts with racial slurs, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “fake negro.” He saluted the Confederacy, and he seemed to thirst for civil war.

He was not an unlettered man: In his years at school, Calhoun had written a master’s thesis on the historiography of Napoleon’s peninsular war and had attended a law seminar in Belgium. His profile — a well-educated, white-collar white man — matched that of some of the other Georgians who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, radicals of the establishment from a state in the grips of a political identity crisis.

The crowd that came from Georgia included a 53-year-old investment portfolio manager and a 65-year-old accountant. It included Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., 51, a successful business owner who graduated from an elite Atlanta prep school, who was arrested in Washington the day after the riot with guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a phone with his text messages about “putting a bullet” into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head.

Calhoun, 58, was the grandson of a lawyer and the son of a doctor, in a family that counts among its ancestors John C. Calhoun, the 19th-century pro-slavery politician. He grew up in Americus, where he attended Southland Academy, one of the many private all-white schools that opened across the South during the wave of public school integration.

At the University of Georgia, in Athens, Calhoun found his place in the Greek system, a largely segregated world of columned fraternity and sorority houses, parties and privilege. His fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, was the longest continually active fraternity at the university, and boasted of producing two Georgia governors.

But he also found a place amid the distinctly Southern college-town bohemia that had emerged in the 1980s in Athens, which had become an incubator for idiosyncratic rock bands like the B-52s and R.E.M. While not always overtly political, the scene introduced a generation of white Southerners to new ways of thinking and living. Calhoun was one of them, and he became a mainstay in Athens as the bass player for a group called Fashion Battery, and later, the Kilkenny Cats.

Later he began a law career in Americus, an old Confederate cotton town and the seat of Sumter County, about 140 miles south of Atlanta. Sumter has for decades played an important role in liberal Georgia’s sense of possibility. A multiracial Christian commune, Koinonia Farm, was founded there in the 1940s. Jimmy Carter lives in the tiny town of Plains, and the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, founded by a Koinonia family, is headquartered in Americus.

Black residents in Sumter make up a reliable Democratic base, while whites are often divided, as one local put it, between liberal “come heres,” like Habitat employees, and conservative, locally raised, “been heres.”

Calhoun was a liberal “been here,” and he did not hide it. He ran, unsuccessfully, as a Democrat for district attorney. In 2004, he wrote a letter to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, praising a Black state Supreme Court justice in a tight reelection race and criticizing her opponent for running a “rather contemptuous and somewhat racist campaign.” People had no doubt about his politics.

“He would oftentimes talk about how our judicial system is too hard on people,” said Bruce Harkness, a lawyer in the mountains of northern Georgia where Calhoun spent a few years as a public defender. “He didn’t believe that drug offenses should be so criminalized.”

Calhoun was now moving with a neo-hippie crowd, playing in jam bands and going to festivals. When he returned to private practice, he was an all-purpose small town lawyer, and many of his clients had little income. From one, he accepted payment in tie-dye garments.

After the 2016 election, an old friend, Bob Fortin, remembers Calhoun excoriating him for voting for Trump. “He cussed me out in his kitchen,” said Fortin, who said he later regretted his vote. “He made me feel like a complete ass.”

Then, about a year ago, came Calhoun’s abrupt political shift. “I thought his Facebook was hacked,” Fortin said.

The trigger appeared to be gun control. Calhoun had not always been obsessed with guns, friends said. But in the fall of 2019, some Democratic politicians began talking of ambitious new gun restrictions and it seemed to flip a switch. Calhoun said as much himself.

“I was a Democrat for 30 years,” he wrote in a recent social media post. The new gun control proposals changed that, he said. “I was called a white supremacist and a racist for defending the 2A,” he continued, using a shorthand for the Second Amendment. Given all that he had done as a lawyer for “justice,” he said, “that hurt my feelings a little. That’s when I became a Trump supporter.”

His conversion was total. By the fall of 2020 he was posting about a looming “domestic communist problem” and the “rioting BLM-Antifa crime wave.” Of Joe Biden, he wrote: “Hang the bastard.”

Old friends were baffled, and some grew nervous. “I’ll be slinging enough hot lead to stack you commies up like cordwood,” Calhoun wrote on Twitter in October. Then, a few days later: “Standing by, and when Trump makes the call, millions of heavily armed, pissed off patriots are coming to Washington.”

After the election, Calhoun held a small gun rights rally in town, and the violent posts continued, with talk of civil war, mounting heads on pikes and showing the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar “what the bottom of the river looks like.” In December, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, found Calhoun buying a Confederate flag outside a Trump rally. “This is about independence and freedom,” Calhoun told the reporter, describing Trumpism and Southern secession as similarly justified fights against tyranny.

On Jan. 6, Calhoun’s posts showed he had made his way inside the U.S. Capitol with the mob. “The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door,” he wrote in one post. “Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen.”

A week later, federal agents arrested him at his sister’s house in Macon, Georgia, where he had stockpiled two AR-15-style assault rifles, two shotguns, a handgun, brass knuckles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, according to the testimony of an FBI agent.

David Lankford, an old friend and client, said that Calhoun, whose federal public defender declined to comment, had always been hot-tempered in debating his views. The two had sparred for years, said Lankford, a Republican, so he was surprised when Calhoun called him last year talking of Democratic “betrayal” over gun policy and other matters. But while Calhoun’s politics had changed drastically, Lankford said, his personality had not.

“He’s the same old banty rooster, just on the other side of the fence,” Lankford said.

At Calhoun’s Jan. 21 court hearing in Macon, Charles H. Weigle, the federal magistrate judge, ruled that there was probable cause to believe that Calhoun had committed crimes when he stormed the Capitol.

He declined to let Calhoun out on bond.

A man who had committed such “extreme violence,” the judge said — who believed that it was his patriotic duty to take up arms and fight in a new civil war — constituted a danger to the community.

The judge sent Calhoun back to jail.