Voter Suppression Emergency: The Ari Berman Interview
Ari Berman, senior reporter for Mother Jones, closely documents the voter suppression emergency fueled by dark money as Republicans pass state laws based on the Big Lie. This is legal warfare to hijack our democracy and help ensure the next Trump steals the election and stays in power. We must all listen to Stacey Abrams and call our Senators to demand they support the For the People Act. Make sure to call your Senator today, and every week, until the For the People Act is passed.
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books The View from Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in the Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And we're joined today with a very special guest, Ari Berman. Welcome, Ari, to Gaslit Nation.
Ari Berman:
Thank you, guys. Great to talk to you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ari is a senior reporter at Mother Jones, covering voting rights. He's the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America and the author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.
Andrea Chalupa:
Obviously, he has a very important front row seat to a historic level of voter suppression legal warfare being carried out by the increasingly authoritarian GOP. So, he's here to explain to us what is going on, how it's all happening, and what to do about it.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right. So the first question for you, Ari, if you could walk us through, what is the current landscape of the Republican assault on voting rights like?
Ari Berman:
Oh, wow. Where do I start? So, first off, I want to say this podcast is probably going to be depressing as shit, but I am very excited to talk to both of you.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh, that's our standard. So you're right at home.
Andrea Chalupa:
We expect nothing less.
Ari Berman:
I feel like all three of us have had this experience where we've been shouting into the wind about what's been happening to our democracy. And slowly, everyone else is catching up, which is a nice feeling but also a deeply unsettling one. People are only catching up because things are getting so terrible that it's impossible to ignore anymore. So, I imagine you guys can relate to that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh, very much so.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. It's every episode.
Sarah Kendzior:
We were talking about how we felt like we were screaming from inside of a hole that keeps getting dug deeper and deeper. So our voices become fainter and fainter.
Ari Berman:
Hopefully our voices will become louder and louder.
Sarah Kendzior:
Exactly.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly.
Ari Berman:
But, yeah. In any case, I would say that there's just been this incredible attempt by the Republican party to weaponize Trump's big lie, that voter suppression obviously did not begin in 2021. It's been going on for a long time in American history and it's been going on for a long time in the Republican party.
Ari Berman:
But this is such an intensification and an acceleration of the existing effort, and I would say it's happening on two related tracks. One is all of the laws that have been passed to make it harder to vote. So, in Georgia and in Florida and all of those things, whether it's making it more difficult to vote by mail or cutting back on the amount of time that people have to vote, making it harder in lots of different ways for people to cast ballots.
Ari Berman:
Then, there's the related effort, which is just to try to overturn the election results altogether in routine matters of election administration. And those two things are related, but also kind of different and the fact that they're happening at the same time, to me, is what's most chilling here, because we're basically setting up a situation where the Republican party is doing everything they can to make it harder to vote. And if somehow that doesn't succeed, then they have this fallback option, which is they can just try to nullify the will of the voters. And I'm not sure that that will succeed. I mean, obviously, Trump wanted them to do that in 2020 and it didn't happen, but I'm just basically very concerned that everything the Republican party is doing right now is to try to succeed where they failed in 2020.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, without question. And I read somewhere that if all of these laws had been in place for 2020, Trump would still be president.
Ari Berman:
Yeah. I mean, it's hard to know in terms of how would people have adopted the laws, right? But it's certainly true that a lot of people used voting methods that have been cut back on. A lot of people were sent mail ballots or sent mail ballot request forms that they're not going to get anymore. A lot of people used drop boxes that won't be available anymore. A lot of people voted through methods that are going to be more difficult; there's less time to vote by mail, there's more rules to vote by mail, there's less time to vote early in some states, there's new ID requirements. There's things like that that people won't be able to comply with.
Ari Berman:
And then there's, of course, the fact that they are also intensifying control over how elections are run and managed. And so in certain states, like in Georgia, they have given the gerrymandered legislature a lot more control over the state election board and the power to potentially take over local election boards. And they're also ... Some of the Republicans that, they weren't great, but they actually did do their jobs and stand up to Donald Trump, and now they're being primaried or they've quit out of frustration.
Ari Berman:
So there's this really toxic ingredient right now, where the Republican party at every level is marching in lockstep to try to get an advantage in future elections. And, of course, you guys have studied authoritarianism around the world. That's exactly what happens in authoritarian countries. You try to rig the results so that you'll never lose power in the first place. Or if you are potentially voted out of power, the election results just won't be recognized. And I fear that's the situation we're heading in in America right now.
Andrea Chalupa:
So I'm going to ask you a question that sounds very simplistic, and I'm asking it because, because of the stuff we cover on this show, sometimes we get questions that are so simplistic that you can tell the person is asking it because they're coming from a place of just disbelief, because this corruption is just so brazen and shameless. So my question is, just to basically address anybody out there who's struggling with the weight of this corruption and how in-your-face it is, why are Republicans leading an all out assault on voting rights?
Ari Berman:
Well, because they're trying to rewrite the rules, or rig the rules, for their own benefit, that they believe that they no longer appeal to a majority of Americans, so instead of reaching out to new voters, instead of reaching out to a diversifying America, they are trying to prevent new voters, prevent a diversifying America, from participating effectively in the political process.
Ari Berman:
And I think this is all being driven around the changing demographics of the country, that you have a country that is becoming more urban, more progressive, more diverse, and you have a Republic party that is becoming older, whiter, and more conservative, a Republican party that is in direct opposite to the changes that are happening in the country. And instead of trying to change their policies to appeal to more Americans, they are instead just trying to shut more Americans out of the political process.
Ari Berman:
And I think that is what is being ... that is what is driving us on a big picture level. Then, I think if you drove down a little bit more, there are all of these grievances that Trump had about the election and all of these reasons why he claimed that the election was rigged, and they're basically legislating based on all of those things, the very things that Trump's complaining about. Whether it's mail voting or whether it's drop boxes or whether it's election workers who weren't sufficiently obedient to him, those are the exact kind of things they are now trying to legislate.
Ari Berman:
And so it's both this big picture worry about where America is heading and the fact that they can't compete in that, but also, on a more fundamental level, it's the fact that they are legislating based on the Big Lie and all of their priorities are being driven by it.
Andrea Chalupa:
And what impact will this have on the 2022 and 2024 elections?
Ari Berman:
So that's a really interesting question. It's going to have a tangible impact in the sense that rules are going to have changed and become more restrictive in a number of states. So, in places like Georgia, they did things like send absentee ballot request forms to all voters to encourage people to vote by mail. The Secretary of State can't do that anymore. They had mobile voting units so that they could reach people who didn't have rides or had a hard time getting to the polls. Those things are no longer operative.
Ari Berman:
There were a lot of drop boxes. There were 120 drop boxes in metro Atlanta to drop your mail ballot off. Now, there's going to be 20. There's going to be many fewer mail ballot drop boxes. There were big polling places, like State Farm Arena in Atlanta was used as a polling place. That really worked very well, because it was a huge basketball city and then a lot of people could vote at at a state that had 11-hour lines at various points in the last election. Those kind of things might be banned because counties can't accept private donations anymore.
Ari Berman:
So there's lots of tangible ways in which voting has changed. And then the way that's less obvious is that, when it comes to how votes are counted, there could be really major disputes in future elections in a way that didn't occur in 2020. So, for example, in Georgia, the gerrymandered state legislature kicked the Secretary of State—Brad Raffensperger, who stood up to Donald Trump—kicked him off as a voting member and the chair of the state election board, which oversees voting laws in the state. Now, the legislature gets to appoint a majority of members to the state election board. So they essentially control the state election board.
Ari Berman:
Then, the state election board can take over up to four county election boards. So you could have the state election board, which is beholden to a gerrymandered legislature, take over election operations in the biggest and most democratic counties in Atlanta, for example, if they view them as underperforming.
Ari Berman:
Then, there's also another provision that says there can be unlimited challenges to voter eligibility, that right-wing groups can try to challenge eligibility of voters. So let's say there's a close election. Let's stay Stacey Abrams is running for governor against Brian Kemp in 2022 and the election is decided by 5,000 votes. Well, what's the county election board going to do? How many challenges are there going to be to people's voter eligibility? Will the state election board get involved? Will the election be certified? All of these things that Trump tried to do in 2020 that he couldn't do, those are now on the table for future elections.
Sarah Kendzior:
One thing I'm wondering about is that it seems like the Democrats should have seen this coming well in advance, because as you mentioned, this builds on previous voter suppression laws. It certainly builds on the partial repeal of the VRA, and we saw all these tactics forming in 2020. We know that we're dealing with a ruthless party that's seeking permanent minority rule, electoral autocracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yet the response has been very tepid. They have not, as promised, passed laws to protect voting rights. They have not passed, for example, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. The blame seems to fall on Sinema and Manchin, yet there have been indicators that there may be other Democrats in the Senate who don't support this.
Sarah Kendzior:
Can you explain what's going on? Because, you know, we may lose our country but this also just, at the least, seems to go against their own self-interest, because they themselves will not be able to win an election as a Democrat in these conditions.
Ari Berman:
Yeah, this has been the most confounding part of all of it. The intensity of the Republican party to undermine voting rights has not been the surprising part of this. The lack of urgency among the Democratic party to combat it has been what's surprising, because you're right. This was all obvious. It was obvious that when states like Georgia and Texas came back in 2021, they were going to legislate based on the Big Lie and they were going to try to pass sweeping restrictions on voting. They were going to try to make it easier to overturn elections.
Ari Berman:
And the only thing that was going to stop them was a federal response because Democrats don't really have any leverage in states that are controlled by Republicans, short of what Texas Democrats did, which is walk out of the chamber. But that was a temporary measure. That's something that's not going to ultimately be able to kill the bill. And the courts have already gutted the Voting Rights Act and basically given a green light to voter suppression efforts. And that was before Donald Trump appointed 234 federal judges.
Ari Berman:
I think Democrats have just been very, very slow to deal with this on a national level. I think the Biden administration has had this feeling that if only they can get COVID under control, if only the economy improves, that the better angels of America will prevail. And I think that just really underestimates the extent to which Republicans are rigging the rules so that Democrats can't win fair elections. And if they don't succeed in rigging the rules, they're going to just try to overturn the election altogether, which is something that's incredibly difficult to try to maneuver around, the ultimate act of voter suppression.
Ari Berman:
So I think this sense of urgency is starting to set in now. The problem is it's already quite late. I mean, they should have been raising these alarms in February. They should have been raising these alarms in March. And I understand that they were dealing with the tremendous fallout of COVID and that probably was their overriding priority. And it's hard to argue with that.
Ari Berman:
But at this point, I mean, we're already into June. They haven't passed anything, any federal legislation. The justice department hasn't filed any lawsuits challenging voter suppression laws, and we're losing critical amounts of time in that, even if the John Lewis Voting Rights Act was passed tomorrow, it won't reverse the voter suppression efforts that have already been passed. Only the For the People Act would do that. And it's pretty remarkable to me that they couldn't figure out a way to get Joe Manchin to support it and they couldn't build more support within their caucus with some of the Democratic senators to talk about the importance of, if not abolishing the filibuster, then at least having an exception to it to pass fundamental voting rights legislation.
Ari Berman:
To me, these kind of conversations should have been happening months ago, not just starting to happen now.
Andrea Chalupa:
So you've been around a long time covering these people. Your book, Herding Donkeys, goes into the power dynamics. What do you think Democratic leadership, namely Schumer, is thinking in terms of ... How is he going to rein in Manchin, rein in Sinema? What do Manchin and Sinema ultimately want? Is it as simple as the Koch brothers, the Koch enterprise, their pressuring, their dark money works? Is it Manchin's long history being on the other side of the fence? I read somewhere that he was involved with ALEC, which is the legal warfare operation by the far right to pass all these far-right laws for the interest of corporations and clamp down on all sorts of rights.
Andrea Chalupa:
So what is your insight into the Democratic establishment and why they've been so slow? And also, could you just talk us through the dynamics, specifically with Manchin and Sinema?
Ari Berman:
Well, that's a really good question. I think if the Democrats knew the answer to that, they might have figured out how to move them easier. I think first off, these are people that care about optics rather than policy. It's very clear to me that Joe Manchin hasn't actually given a single substantive reason why he opposes the For the People Act. He only opposes it because it's not "bipartisan."
Ari Berman:
So he doesn't obviously care what's in the bill. He supports one voting rights bill because it has a Republic cosponsor. He doesn't support another one because it doesn't have a Republic cosponsor. I don't think he actually understands the differences between the two voting rights bills: one he's supporting, one he's opposing.
Ari Berman:
So I think the Republicans have just put a tremendous amount of pressure on him in West Virginia, so he feels like he has to appear bipartisan, even as Republicans, of course, are doing everything they can to try to prevent Democrats from ever winning another fair election. So there's a complete aspect of asymmetric warfare here.
Ari Berman:
Manchin's basically giving Republicans veto power over protecting democracy, where Republicans are systematically excluding Democrats when it comes to passing voter suppression laws. So, I think they have to redefine what bipartisanship means to people like Manchin and Sinema and say, "Listen, these are very, very popular pieces of legislation. This is bipartisan in terms of the voters that support it. It might not be bipartisan in terms of the Republicans, but how can you expect Republicans to support voting rights legislation when they are the ones who are suppressing the votes? I mean, it makes no sense why they would support voting rights legislation when the overriding goal of their party is to make it harder to vote."
Ari Berman:
And I also do think if you look at their constituencies, I mean clearly they spend a lot more time worrying about big business, worrying a lot more about conservative interests, than they do about progressive activists. And it's definitely true that dark money groups have spent a lot of time targeting them.
Ari Berman:
We reported a story in Mother Jones a few weeks ago, where Heritage Action for America, which is a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, we had this leaked video where they basically talked about how they were writing all of these voter suppression bills. And one of the things they've done is they've targeted Joe Manchin. They've run ads against him. They've gone to West Virginia and held rallies against him. And there's just this whole apparatus on the right to try to influence people like Joe Manchin and basically to turn popular legislation, which the For the People Act is, into unpopular pieces of legislation.
Ari Berman:
And ironically, that's an argument for the For the People Act, because it would crack down on the kind of dark money that's influencing people like Joe Manchin. But I do think that basically all the pressure on them has come to bear basically from the right as opposed to putting a lot of pressure on them from the left. There's been more on Sinema because Arizona's more diverse and more progressive than West Virginia is. But generally speaking, they're worried about their right flank, not their left flank.
Andrea Chalupa:
So Sinema can't get reelected unless she brings that right flank with her?
Ari Berman:
For me, Kyrsten Sinema deserves even more criticism than Joe Manchin for this, because Joe Manchin does represent a state that is very conservative. So we could argue that we know what's better for West Virginia than Joe Manchin is, but it's hard to know exactly what it takes for a Democrat to get elected there.
Ari Berman:
Kyrsten Sinema represents a state that Democrats won in 2020, that elected a Democratic senator in 2020, that is changing demographically in a way that favors Democrats. It is also a state that has been an epicenter of voter suppression efforts. I mean, the audit—the so-called audit, the fraudit—is taking place in her own backyard, because of the fact that her state is much more of a swing state than West Virginia and the fact that Arizona Republicans have been spending much more time trying to suppress votes than Republicans in West Virginia, where it's already a red state. And the fact that Sinema won not because of her right flank, but because of all of the work of younger activists—of progressive activists—to get her elected. Those are the people that were knocking on doors. Those were the people that were spending the most time on her behalf. And she just completely turned her back on them.
Ari Berman:
And I haven't heard her say anything denouncing voter suppression laws. I haven't heard her say anything denouncing the audit. And there just seems like a complete lack of urgency on her behalf compared to, for example, the senators from Georgia—Ossoff and Warnock—that have been warning every single day about the voter suppression efforts that are happening in their own states. I don't know why Sinema doesn't have the same sense of urgency, because this not only affects democracy but it more directly affects her own self-interests than Joe Manchin, for example, who can argue that he is in a much more conservative state, a much more red state, and he has to distance himself from the national Democratic party. I don't necessarily know why Sinema would have to make that same argument given how Arizona is trending and given the threat to democracy in her own backyard.
Andrea Chalupa:
So is she just bought off by big corporate donors?
Ari Berman:
She might be. Certainly, if you talk to activists in Arizona, I mean, they can't get meetings with her but she's more than happy to speak to the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and those kind of people. And I don't know if that's just she feels like that's the way for her to get reelected or she feels like she needs to stay tight with the Cindy McCains of the world-
Andrea Chalupa:
... Cindy McCain is on ... She was a surrogate for Biden. And she was targeted by this far-right movement.
Ari Berman:
That's what I really don't understand about her calculations. And it's honestly been baffling to Democrats in Arizona. State legislators in Arizona, pretty high ranking people, they can't even get a meeting with her. They can't even talk to her about this kind of stuff. I mean, Sinema, as far as we know, isn't even holding meetings with civil rights leaders in the way that Joe Manchin is doing.
Ari Berman:
So I think Joe Manchin is more substantively wrong than Kyrsten Sinema is in the sense that he hasn't sponsored the For the People Act, but he has more of an open door policy than she does. And it's just really confounding given everything that's going on in her state right now.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. So if this were Ukraine, I think activist reformers would be looking into Kyrsten Sinema's offshore bank accounts in Cyprus. You know what I mean? That's how she's behaving, is that kind of a Ukraine official.
Ari Berman:
Yeah. Well, maybe that's the next step.
Sarah Kendzior:
And she's behaving as if she's not going to run. It honestly reminds me of Sarah Palin. It reminds me of when she abandoned her job in Alaska to be a reality TV star or to be a sort of quirky, obnoxious celebrity. But the thing is, the stakes are obviously very high here. We have this situation in the Senate where she is the hold up, and for the entire country to be held at the whim of somebody like that, somebody who has no seeming investment in her job in serving the public, but even in the survival of the United States as a sovereign democratic entity, it's really remarkable.
Sarah Kendzior:
At what point can the federal government do anything to get around the situation of obstructionism in the Senate, even from within the Democratic party?
Ari Berman:
Well, that's the question here, is, can the Senate function at all? There's not going to be 60 votes for any major pieces of legislation. And so basically, the entire Biden agenda, but more fundamentally, the entire protection of democracy is just going to die if they don't do anything about the filibuster, because even the voting rights bills that Joe Manchin supports aren't going to get anywhere near 60 votes.
Ari Berman:
And I wrote a big piece for Mother Jones a few weeks ago about the parallels between the Jim Crow era and today, and one of the most striking similarities was that the federal government just gave up on protecting the voting rights. And there was a lot of similarities to what happened back then and what's happening right now. Mississippi passed a Constitution in 1890, basically to disenfranchise Black voters through a literacy test, poll taxes, property requirements, all of those things. The House passed a bill called the Lodge Bill for the federal supervision of elections that would give the federal government the power to basically stop the voter suppression efforts and the effort at total White supremacy in the states. And it was killed by both ... It was, at this point, Democrats were the party of White supremacy. So it was killed by Democratic intransigence, but it was also killed by a few Republican senators that crossed over to join with the Democrats to block this last major effort to enforce voting rights.
Ari Berman:
And basically, between 1890 and 1957, when Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act, which basically was pretty toothless, Congress essentially did nothing to try to stop voter suppression and Jim Crow in the South. And it really wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that they did anything to try to solve the problem of voter suppression and Black disenfranchisement in the South.
Ari Berman:
And I just worry that history is going to repeat itself here, not that we're going to have the same level of literacy tests and poll taxes now that we have back then, but this idea that one party would just do everything it can to undermine democracy and there would be no federal response.
Ari Berman:
And people were asking the question back then, "How can the federal government do nothing? Mississippi is saying out loud that it's passing this Constitution to disenfranchise Black voters. How can the federal government do nothing?" And the federal government did nothing. And from 1890 to 1907, every single Southern state rewrote their Constitution to disenfranchise Black voters, and that held until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.
Ari Berman:
And so I'm just extremely worried about what message it will send to Republicans in positions of authority if Congress does nothing, not to mention the fact that it's very unlikely that if Congress does nothing, that Democrats are going to be in the majority in one or both houses of Congress in 2022.
Ari Berman:
And then it's either ... Then, you're basically saying Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell has just complete veto power over protecting our democracy. And Joe Biden's just going to be helpless as Republicans change the rules even more than all of these swing states to either make it so that Democrats can't win an election, or if they do win an election, so that state legislatures or Republicans in Congress can override the will of the voters.
Ari Berman:
That's the nightmare scenario we're heading towards, and you'd think Democrats would just be doing everything humanly possible to try to keep that from happening.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. One of the things that's really striking here is that this election in 2020 was largely won—to give the Democrats a majority and to get Biden in office—by Black activists and other activists of color, particularly in Georgia. That was a grassroots effort led by Black activists to get two Democratic senators, to get Biden in power.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this just seems like complete and utter abandonment; abandonment morally, abandonment legally, and abandonment pragmatically, because not only will people have their votes suppressed or their votes even just overrode by a state legislature, it seems like this would greatly affect morale. Why should people turn out for the Democrats if the Democrats aren't going to stand up for their basic fundamental right to vote when the GOP is very overtly trying to disenfranchise them? What are your thoughts about that?
Ari Berman:
Well, I think that's exactly why Raphael Warnock has been so outspoken about this issue, that when he and John Ossoff ran for the Senate and they said, "We're going to pass a new voting rights act," it didn't have an asterisk under it that said, "Only if Mitch McConnell allows us to do it." They know that's an untenable message. They know they can't go back to Georgia and say, "Well, we would have passed voting rights legislation. We would have passed effort to prevent mass shootings. We would have raised the minimum wage. But Mitch McConnell didn't let us." Well, then why should they be reelected if that's the argument?
Ari Berman:
And so I think that's what they've been saying publicly, and I think that's what they've been saying privately to Joe Manchin, too, that, "Listen, you have remained a Democrat in West Virginia. You've made a conscious decision to remain a Democrat in West Virginia, which means that you care about the survival of the Democratic party. And the Democratic party is not going to be able to survive this. It's not going to be able to survive an onslaught of changing the rules, where between the combination of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and election subversion, Republicans are going to be able to take back one or both chambers of Congress and then also use this incredibly anti-democratic filibuster to basically block hugely popular pieces of legislation."
Ari Berman:
I mean, I don't think people realize that 41 Republican senators representing just 21% of the country can block bills supported by 80 to 90% of Americans. That's just so unbelievably antidemocratic. I don't believe the Democrats have done an effective job of pointing out what the filibuster means, that it doesn't just mean that you don't pass voting rights legislation: no gun control legislation gets passed, no raising the minimum wage, likely no action on climate change, all of these things that the Democrats had a mandate to do aren't going to be possible.
Ari Berman:
And so what's the message then in 2022? What's the message then in 2024? Biden is hoping that if he can get COVID under control—which he has largely—and if he can get the economy back on track, that he can make this pragmatic message that America is improving, that can overcome all of the structural disadvantages that Democrats face. I don't believe that it can overcome them. I believe that the structural disadvantages that Democrats face are so great right now and are only looming greater because of what Republicans are doing at the state level and what they're blocking at the federal level, that it's going to be very difficult for Biden to message a better economy or message a better COVID situation if Republicans are just running around preventing Democrats from voting or trying to overturn election results.
Andrea Chalupa:
Hillary tried to run on the same message in 2016—that America's doing great, it's a strong economy—and people just punished that. They punished the establishment, or so they thought, in the ballot box. It was that same sort of angry Brexit voter rage. So, yeah, we're in for a big shock to the system in 2022 if they don't do something about this. In terms of what Biden can do, you mentioned the DOJ suing some of these Republican-led states and their voter suppression laws. What could Merrick Garland do to protect our elections in 2022 and 2024?
Ari Berman:
Well, they could sue states like Georgia and Florida and presumably Texas, whenever its voter suppression law passes, which both would put the fire power of the federal government on their side, but also might potentially send a message to other states that if you're considering this kind of thing, we're going to oppose it.
Ari Berman:
Now, I think there's only so much they can do, because their hands are really tied by the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. All of these Southern states don't have to submit their voting changes anymore, so they don't have a way to block these laws ahead of time. And also, the fact that the Supreme Court any day now could further weaken the Voting Rights Act in a case out of Arizona.
Ari Berman:
And so they are proceeding very cautiously because they're worried about what's happening to the Voting Rights Act, and they're worried that even if they do sue these states, it's going to take a long time for litigation. And the litigation is ultimately going to go before conservative dominated courts, which is why when Merrick Garland made his first major speech on voting rights, he basically said Congress needs to pass the For the People Act and pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act so we can do our jobs. Otherwise, we can file all the lawsuits in the world, but we don't know if it's going to succeed, because it's going before hostile courts and it's going to take a tremendous amount of time even if we win to block these laws through very cumbersome litigation that honestly sometimes takes years.
Ari Berman:
So this is one of those things where I do think the Justice Department should be more aggressive, but I don't think it's a cut and dry issue necessarily, because even if they had the best intentions on this and they have very, very good head of the Civil Rights Division Kristen Clarke, very, very good associate Attorney General for Civil Rights Vanita Gupta. I mean, these are two long time stalwart civil rights lawyers. Even if they have the best of intentions, there's only so much they can do before a hostile judiciary and with little to no voting rights protections in Congress.
Ari Berman:
And that's why, ultimately, I think the federal response is going to have to come from Congress, not the administration. And that's what's missing right now.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. So what we always say with authoritarianism, the judiciary are the cage bars on the democracy. Ukraine is suffering from a lot of those corrupt judges, too. So in terms of Biden... so let's say Congress ... Chuck Schumer can't get Manchin and Sinema to finally come to their senses and do the right thing for our democracy, what are we left with? Could Biden pass executive orders to at least ensure that we have some protections in place so they can't get away with the Big Lie in 2022, in 2024?
Ari Berman:
He can do some stuff at the margins, but the problem in our system is that states have a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of how to run their elections, and then there's certain power that's given to Congress when it comes to regulating federal elections. And that power's not given to presidents.
Ari Berman:
So Biden has to work, again, kind of with his hands tied on this issue. They could increase efforts to try to register new voters. They could increase monitoring of elections through the Justice Department. They could move to different pieces of legislation if there's no agreement on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act or there's no agreement on the For the People Act. Maybe they can try to amend the Electoral Count Act to make it harder to overturn future elections.
Ari Berman:
Right now, it only takes one senator and one House member to raise an objection to election results, and you can make the bar to that much higher so that you can't just challenge every single election result. Will that get 60 votes in the Senate? I mean, my feeling is if a January 6th commission can't get 60 votes in the Senate, how is revising the Electoral Count Act or doing anything else on voting going to get 60 votes either? But I imagine if the sweeping pieces of legislation don't succeed, then they're going to try to move on to things that tinker more around the margins, that are thought of as more pragmatic, that maybe can get 60 votes. I think that's going to be very, very difficult, but I think that's probably the fallback plan.
Ari Berman:
But in terms of sweeping action to stop voter suppression, it's very, very hard for Joe Biden to do it alone.
Andrea Chalupa:
One thing we are seeing is this TikTok generation and how savvy they've been. So those kids who are going to be of voting age in 2022 and 2024, are you seeing any sign where the numbers might—the demographic change might help be a buffer against any of this?
Ari Berman:
Yeah, that's a good point. If you look at Arizona, you look at Georgia, those electorates are going to continue to get younger and more diverse and, you would think, more progressive. So that is one positive for the Democrats.
Ari Berman:
I would say in general, the major success story from 2020 was just this gigantic effort to make sure that people's votes were counted. The level of voter education was beyond anything that I've ever seen. The fact that so many people got involved—from election officials to celebrities to sports teams—in helping people vote was tremendously helpful. And remember, that was also a very, very difficult situation. I mean, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Lots of states hadn't used mail voting before. There was a deliberate attempt to try to hobble the Post Office.
Ari Berman:
So there were all of these ingredients for a democracy crisis in 2020 and actually, the election went relatively smoothly considering, and the number of rejected ballots was actually lower in 2020 than it was in 2016, which is just remarkable, given how difficult it was to hold a national election in a pandemic.
Ari Berman:
And so that was really the hopeful part. Everything that happened after was the screwed up part. The effort to overturn the election was the screwed up part, but the election itself went quite smoothly. And I think that's something that we can really build on, that we know that this model of really encouraging people to vote, telling people exactly how to vote, making sure they have all the tools to be able to vote, that's going to be really, really important in future elections, especially as the law changes, because people are going to need to be aware of what it takes to get a mail ballot, or what it takes to drop your ballot off, or what new IDs you need, those kind of things, because the laws have become more restrictive in a lot of state—not insurmountable, but more restrictive.
Ari Berman:
So that kind of voter organizing is more important than ever. And it's possible in some states like Georgia, there could be a backlash effect, that Stacey Abrams says the reason that the right to vote is under attack is because they don't want you to vote. And that's why it's more important than ever that you go out and have your voices heard. I don't think that's inconceivable either, that in some places this could motivate people to turn out, but we have to be really honest about the fact that it's going to require a massive voter mobilization effort in future elections, just like it required in 2020, because the laws are changing in so many states.
Andrea Chalupa:
And it has to require clear messaging. One analysis came out on the Dems losing the House. Or no, the Dems losing the strength, the numbers in their majority, in the House. And part of that had to do with their TV messaging saying that we're going to work with ... we're going to be bipartisan. And meanwhile, the Republicans are running ads saying, "We're going to crush our opposition into a bloody pulp."
Andrea Chalupa:
And so the Dems have just been miserable with messaging and trying to toe the middle line and trying to be all things to all people. And meanwhile, the House is on fire. So there's this big disconnect between this weird, surreal, “everything is fine” Dem messaging versus the reality on the ground, and people's anxieties keeping them up at night over Trump, over the Republican party, and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa:
Could you talk specifically about the role of Democrats' messaging, how it's held them back, how it's hurt them, and what they need to do moving forward?
Ari Berman:
Well, this has been the astonishing part of it, and it's been crazy. I haven't met a single person ever on the street that cares about the filibuster. I haven't met a single person that says, "You know what? I'd rather have the filibuster than a $15 minimum wage," or, "I'd rather have the filibuster than a fair and free election," or, "I'd rather have the filibuster than a clean planet."
Ari Berman:
How the filibuster became more important than actually delivering for people is astonishing to me. It's actually shocking to me that, just from a pragmatic standpoint, Democrats would rather keep a vestige of Jim Crow than stop the next wave of Jim Crow laws. Not to mention all of the other things you could do if you eliminated the filibuster.
Ari Berman:
So the Democrats have valued proceduralism, and the Democrats have valued these antiquated institutions and these vague notions of bipartisanship over actually delivering for people's lives. And I just find that to be extraordinary and a complete moral abdication of their responsibility. No one's going to look back in 50 years and say, "You know what? We kept the filibuster, but the planet was burning and our democracy was on fire.”-
Andrea Chalupa:
Now we’re all in a Gulag.
Ari Berman:
“But listen, we kept the filibuster, so it was all okay." It's just... It’s just extraordinary that this is the situation we find ourselves in.
Ari Berman:
And so again, I think they have to redefine what bipartisanship means. Bipartisanship means delivering popular policies for people. And if 70% of voters support things, to me, that's bipartisan whether or not a Republican supports it or not in Congress. And by the way, there have been lots of times in American history where parties have had to go it alone to make transformative social change. The 15th Amendment would have never passed if it had to be bipartisan because Democrats back then were the party of White supremacy. They weren't going to do anything to promote Black voting rights. Republicans in Congress in the 1870s went alone, decided to go it alone, and ratify the 15th Amendment. Imagine how different American history would be if they sat around waiting for Democrats to sign on to the 15th Amendment.
Ari Berman:
So I think Democrats have to realize that, yes, it would be nice to be bipartisan, but saving our democracy, saving our economy, saving our planet is a lot more important than whether or not Pat Twomey or Mitch McConnell support something.
Andrea Chalupa:
Is Chuck Schumer just weak?
Ari Berman:
Well, I think he's at a huge disadvantage because of the structural biases of the Senate, that right now, Democrats ... it's 50/50 in the Senate, but Democrats represent 41 million more people than Republicans. So the Senate is so unrepresentative that the only way Democrats can get a majority in the Senate—and they barely have a majority right now—is to win in places like West Virginia and to win in swing states like Georgia and Arizona.
Ari Berman:
So that leaves Schumer almost no margin for error, whereas Republicans basically don't have to win in these places. Yes, there are some Republican senators from places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that are tossup states, but Republicans can get 41 votes—which is all they need to block things with a filibuster—entirely from rural, deeply red states that are disproportionately represented because of the structure of the US Senate.
Ari Berman:
So, I think Schumer has these structural impediments, which to me would make it more important than ever to try to get rid of the filibuster, because you'll never get 60 votes given just the crazy pro-rural, pro-White, pro-Republican biases of the Senate that already exist.
Ari Berman:
So it was always going to be very, very difficult for him to do a lot of things. I thought that, on some things, like voting rights, would be viewed as so fundamental for democracy that they would at least have everyone in line. Then, they would have to make an argument that, okay, we need to change the rules at least, or have an exception to the rules, to do this, to be able to protect democracy, because it's so fundamental.
Ari Berman:
And that's been the argument that has really been lagging, that not only have they not gotten Joe Manchin to support the For the People Act, but they seem to be well short of the 50 votes needed to have an exception to the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. And that's where I think they could do a more persuasive job in talking to their own colleagues.
Ari Berman:
When I hear Dianne Feinstein say, "I would get rid of the filibuster if there was a threat to democracy,"-
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh God.
Ari Berman:
How is it an if at this point? I know she's old, but has she not been paying any attention to the news right now? It's just crazy that this is where we're at in June after an attempt to try to overturn an election and then six months of voter suppression laws in reaction to it.
Andrea Chalupa:
They need to be forced to get out of Washington; Dianne Feinstein, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, Schumer. They all need to go on a Democratic roadshow or Democratic town hall tour and meet with the American people, because what we're seeing again and again is that this legislation, doing something about climate change, it's bipartisan now. You have young conservatives who understand the science of climate change.
Andrea Chalupa:
And so it seems like there's this thing where they just have to get out of their little clubhouse and go out among the people, and Schumer could force that. Schumer could embarrass and challenge them and say, "We're going to be doing events. We're going to be doing town halls. We're going to be united. We're going to go into these key districts. We have to do this as a party. And we're going to sit down and talk to real voters."
Andrea Chalupa:
Instead, you have video over the years of Dianne Feinstein running from activists of the Sunrise Movement. It seems like they're just ... Some of them are way too cloistered and not understanding, or happily out of touch with what's going on on the ground because they're just too rich and too old and they're not going to be impacted by the actual consequences of their inaction.
Ari Berman:
Yeah. I mean, I think the party needs fresh blood and new blood. I think it's not a coincidence that all of the freshmen Democrats elected to the Senate have been very strong supporters of voting rights and have been very strong supporters of changing the Senate rules if necessary. And even Mark Kelly in Arizona has been much more outspoken on voting rights issues than Kyrsten Sinema is, and he has to run again in two years, relative to… she's not even up until 2024.
Ari Berman:
And so I think the new people there, both in the House and in the Senate, sense the urgency here. They've been in the communities more recently. But I think a lot of the people that have been there a long time have just been sucked into this complacency where this vague, vapid notion of bipartisanship just completely trumps delivering for people. And I think that's just the completely wrong approach to politics.
Ari Berman:
And to me, Democrats need to take a page from Republicans and start pressuring some of these people and running primary challenges against them and getting more disruptive with them. There should be sit-ins at the offices of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin and-
Andrea Chalupa:
And Feinstein.
Ari Berman:
And Feinstein. She's from California. This should be a no-brainer. So, I just think that there needs to be a pro-democracy movement around these issues so it's not just viewed as this kind of White, elitist, inside-the-beltway type thing, but has a real sense of energy and urgency around it. And I think that's building, but I also think that a lot of people have moved on with their lives since Trump was gone and haven't recognized the threats to our democracy have only gotten greater, not better, since then.
Andrea Chalupa:
Are you aware of any groups that have any sort of plan to finally start organizing sit-ins and taking it to the cloistered Democratic establishment?
Ari Berman:
Well, you saw Reverend Barber doing a moral march on-
Sarah Kendzior:
On Manchin.
Ari Berman:
On Manchin. And Black Voters Matter is doing a big bus tour through the South, and Texas Democrats are coming to Washington to meet with members of Congress. So the pressure is ratcheting up but I do think that it needs to be sharper with some of these people. I think it's been a little bit, in my view, too polite and too, like, begging Manchin to support voting rights as opposed to saying he has to support voting rights. I do feel like the point you raised earlier about all the pressure coming from the right and all the pressure coming from dark money groups, I mean, I think that's how a lot of these people have f. And then the Democrats say, "Oh, we'll just talk to Manchin behind closed doors. We'll just talk to Sinema behind closed doors," and that's not really working right now.
Ari Berman:
So there might be a need to recalibrate your strategy. And it might not work. It very well might not work. It could be that they stage sit-ins in Manchin's office and he decides to become a Republican. [laughs] That's certainly possible! I'm not saying it's going to work. But what else is working right now? Whatever you're doing right now isn't working.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right. I think there's this fear that the left was so divided in 2016. Bernie versus Hillary. And we saw this with the big UK election where the left was very divided, and that ushered in this historic defeat of Labor in the UK. And so I think there's a fear of this trauma of we have to be united. And if you start going after your own, you're the problem.
Ari Berman:
And then there are ideological divides, but I don't think there's an ideological divide within the Democratic party on the need to protect voting rights. I mean, that's so fundamental to democracy. If you can't do that, then what are you good for?
Ari Berman:
Then there's certain issues where you have to draw the line and I think this is one of these issues. I think saving American democracy really overrides everything else, because if we don't do it then it's impossible to do anything else. And that's always why I've made the argument about voting rights being so important, because if we don't have free and fair elections, we're not getting any other kind of outcomes. We're not getting cleaner air or better jobs or a healthier society if we don't have an ability to influence our leaders and then to hold them accountable.
Ari Berman:
And so this is why I think ... this is why the right to vote has been described as preservative of all other rights. I think there was broad unanimity in the party about the importance of doing that. And so I think that this is something that shouldn't be controversial, and the fact that it is is just a reflection—a sorry reflection—of where our politics are today.
Andrea Chalupa:
Okay. So final question. If we were to get rid of this systemic imbalance from the electoral college to the Senate, which very much tilts the scale of power in favor of Republicans—rural, White, evangelical—if we were freed of these shackles, would America be a progressive nation? What kind of country would we be if we didn't have this structural imbalance holding us back?
Ari Berman:
I think we would be a more progressive nation and I think that our institutions would reflect the diversity of our country. Right now, our institutions, all of them, have these biases that are more rural, more White, more conservative than the country as a whole. And that's because of the structure of the Senate. That's because of the structure of the electoral college. That's because of Republican gerrymandering efforts.
Ari Berman:
So, I mean, I don't know how progressive it would be. I don't know that ... It wouldn't guarantee that Democrats would always win in elections, but it would guarantee that Republicans would have to reach out to more voters in order to win elections. And it would mean that younger, more diverse constituencies would have a lot more political power and our institutions would reflect the changing nature of our country, as opposed to being a barrier to the changing nature of our country.
Andrea Chalupa:
And now, a special message from Stacey Abrams and Fair Fight Action on the urgent importance of calling our senators to demand they pass the For the People Act. Call your senator today.
Stacey Abrams:
What I talk about over and over again is that we have to negate the attacks that are anti-voter, that are anti-election worker, and that are antidemocratic. And that's what we're seeing sweep these states. And it is only going to be through federal legislation that we can negate or mitigate the harms being created at the state level, and that means that we need Congress—especially the US Senate—to step up and take action.
Stacey Abrams:
I am endorsing the fact that we now have a list of priorities and that Joe Manchin is at the table. He's part of the conversation. It's an important step forward as we try to protect the freedom to vote and protect access to the vote. I think that he makes common sense opportunities available for compromise. And while, of course, there continue to be negotiations led by Leader Schumer and other senators, it is a critical step forward and one that we should celebrate.
Stacey Abrams:
When people attack our democracy, those who are the victims usually rise up and demand that their access be restored. And that's why we're pushing for Hot Call Summer, where every single day young people in particular are going to be reaching out across the country, calling their US senators to action, calling them to do what must be done to protect our democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to GLAAD, an organization on the front lines of fighting for the rights of LGBTQ people at a time when they, especially trans people, are under attack by repressive and harmful Republican legal warfare. Support their critical work at GLAAD, GLAAD.org.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at Rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans, already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at the TheOrangutanProject.org.
Andrea Chalupa:
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