Not that the former first lady has entirely stayed out of politics, she did cut a video in 2020 for Joe Biden, but she hasn’t spent much time directly advocating for specific legislation. That streak ended this week when Michelle Obama waded into the fight over the filibuster, joining calls from a few dozen other liberal groups to pass some kind of “voting rights” legislation by making a special carve-out in the Senate’s rules to lower the 60-vote threshold.
Essentially, this move would be the first shot in completely unraveling the filibuster altogether since if it’s good enough to bypass for new federal election laws, it should be good enough to bypass for green new deal climate change laws too, right? You can see the slope, and it’s very, very slippery.
Clearly, Democrats are working hard to salvage something of Biden’s domestic legislative agenda before the midterm elections roll around in November. With Build Back Better basically Build Back Deader, the only thing that excites progressives right now is a federal takeover of state and local election laws:
In 2020, millions made their voices heard at the polls. But now, folks who oppose that progress are making it harder to vote. That’s why I’m asking you to join @WhenWeAllVote and 30 other organizations to turn out more voters and urge Congress to pass voting rights legislation. pic.twitter.com/hwgyyuTGy9
— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) January 9, 2022
By joining the letter with other progressive activists organizations, Michelle Obama has decided to become overtly partisan on this issue, and take a rather controversial position to end the filibuster which is “in the way” of passing Biden’s agenda:
The letter — which comes as Congress has yet to move on voting rights legislation at the federal level — was signed by 30 other civic engagement, voting rights and voter mobilization organizations including the NAACP, Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, Voto Latino Foundation, NextGen America, LeBron James’ More Than A Vote and Rock the Vote.
“We stand united in our conviction to organize and turn out voters in the 2022 midterm elections, and make our democracy work for all of us,” Obama wrote in the letter.
The former first lady laid out a plan of action and said within the next year, When We All Vote and the coalition of other organizations will work to “recruit and train at least 100,000 volunteers” and “register more than a million new voters.”
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed the chamber will vote on whether to change the Senate’s legislative filibuster rules by Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 17, if Republicans block Democrats’ latest effort to advance voting rights legislation.
This will be a heavy push by Democrats and a push that is only targeting their own Senators.
Republicans, and most sane-minded people, do not support a federal takeover of state and local election laws. Those powers are reserved at the local level, for good reason, to avoid centralizing control over federal elections. Would Democrats like a future potential President Trump in 2025 to have these new powers and control how federal elections are conducted? I highly doubt it.
However, they’re willing to accept long-term foolishness in favor of short-term gain to try and give Biden something that looks like a victory before his party losses big in November.
For whatever Democrats say about this voting rights legislation, it all comes down to one thing and one thing only. Ending the filibuster:
“We spent all 2021 really fighting for federal voting rights legislation. Over 20,000 people took (advocacy) action with us (last year), and we knew going throughout this year, and seeing that Congress was not acting, and that the filibuster was getting in the way, we realized that we really had to take matters into our own hands,” Stephanie Young, executive director of When We All Vote, told CNN.
“We know at the end of the day, we’re not going to be able to out-organize when it comes to fixing our voting system and modernizing it, and replacing the federal legislation, and that’s why it’s twofold,” Young said.
Democrats want to destroy the filibuster and they think using some scheme of “voting rights” is the way to do it. Once they get one bill around it, they’ll try the next, and so on.
The specific types of guardrails that prevent rampant vote fraud would be removed or eroded entirely by the Freedom to Vote Act, or whatever name you want to call it. The legislation would end up sending a mail-in ballot to every eligible voter for every federal election. That’s not even registered voters, mind you, that’s “eligible” voters. What this means is that millions of ballots would be sent around unsolicited and ripe for the taking and ripe for fraud.
It’s unconscionable, and it’s immoral to open up our electoral system to such fraud at the expense of legal votes.
This legislation simply cannot be allowed to pass in its current form, and it cannot be allowed to pass by eliminating the filibuster. Republicans in Congress have signaled they’re willing to work on some election laws, but nothing that would end up removing any semblance of fairness and integrity within our election process as Democrats are calling for.
