Note: This is a special contribution to the Blue Ear Books Substack newsletter by Paul Rogat Loeb, author of the landmark books Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While. Paul is a friend and a writer on American civic issues for whom I have great respect. This article was also published in The Fulcrum, and an earlier version appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune in September 2021. - Ethan Casey, Publisher, Blue Ear Books
Moderate Republicans could still follow Bob Dole and save voting rights in the United States.
Joe Manchin’s Freedom to Vote voting rights compromise has been deemed dead in the wake of Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to support a filibuster exception. But it still could be saved if one or two self-described moderate Republicans stepped up. They’d follow the path of Kansas Republican Senator Bob Dole, and how he helped save the Voting Rights Act.
It was the 1982 renewal, two years before Dole became Senate Majority Leader, and 14 years before he became the Republican presidential nominee. Dole had voted for the original 1965 act, which Republican minority Leader Everett Dirksen helped shepherd through. But Dirksen was long gone by 1982, and key Reagan administration officials, including future Justices John Roberts and Clarence Thomas, opposed the bill’s renewal. Just two years earlier, Reagan had criticized the 1965 act as “humiliating to the South.”
Dole, a strong conservative who’d defended Nixon during the Watergate scandal, became involved through his African American businessman friend Leroy Tombs, a longtime Republican. As Tombs described, Dole was embarrassed that a voting rights bill was even needed, and expanded the term of key sections to 25 years.
Dole’s bill included a key practical compromise, clarifying that members of a protected class didn’t have to be elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population, so excluding quotas. Dole also clarified that those discriminated against didn’t have to prove that discrimination was intentional, just that access to the vote was clearly being denied or abridged. Once he’d drafted the compromise, Dole then systematically engaged key Republicans, particularly Judiciary Committee members, to support his revised bill. He answered opponents’ arguments, persisted despite initial setbacks, and insisted that supporting African Americans’ right to vote was essential to “save the Republican party,” to “erase the lingering image of our party as the cadre of the elite, the wealthy, the insensitive.” The Senate renewed the act by 65-8, and Reagan ended up signing it.
What if Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, or any other Republican senator who claims to care about democracy acknowledged how gravely new state laws threaten our democratic process? And acknowledged, as many did in 1965 and 1982, that if states are undermining democracy then the federal government must respond? It’s nice for Murkowski, for instance, to join Joe Manchin in arguing that the Voting Rights Act must be reauthorized, that federal oversight over places with a history of discrimination must be restored, and that “inaction is not an option.” But at this point inaction is the response, and the destructive state voting laws and radically undemocratic gerrymanders are on track to prevail.
Like Dole’s 1982 legislation, a voting rights bill doesn’t have to address everything. Manchin’s compromise would go a long way toward addressing the worst abuses, even if it excluded elements of the original House bill that would strengthen democracy further. But for the compromise to pass, Republicans would have to provide 10 votes in the Senate, which isn’t happening. Or one or more could make it a reality by bypassing the filibuster for voting rights bills.
Citizens are rightly furious at Manchin and Sinema for failing to provide a pathway for Manchin’s own compromise to bypass filibuster rules and become law. They’ve done nothing to check the power of legislators who knowingly disenfranchised their fellow citizens. But that doesn’t let supposedly moderate Republicans off the hook. It’s their party that is currently disenfranchising people, so if they want fair and accessible elections, they need to do more than utter platitudes.
Otherwise, we will see no check on the wave of state laws suppressing voting, enshrining the most radical partisan gerrymandering, and wresting the power to count votes away from officials who’ve upheld the law honorably. That’s not even counting anti-Good Samaritan bills that make it illegal to even give water to the thirsty, if they happen to be in a voting line.
Imagine if just one Republican senator backed ending the filibuster in this critical situation. That might create enough pressure for Manchin or Sinema to change their position. If two Republicans did, the bill could be passed, even if they required a few modifications. They could be heroes instead of collaborators.
Bob Dole secured those key votes in a time when many Republicans were actually willing to support enfranchising all Americans, instead of fighting to prevent their voting. Alas, most now seem to regard democracy as expendable if it might hamper their gaining power. But any Republican could still play the role that Dole once did, standing up to defend the franchise. I believe that most Republican senators know that the 2020 results were legitimate, and that the state bills introduced since do nothing but confer partisan advantage. The question is whether they can see past short-term political gain, to truly stand up for a government elected by all eligible Americans. The Bob Dole of 1982 shows that this can be possible.
Learn more about Paul Loeb and his work.
Feb 23 virtual author event: A gripping American story of survival
“Eugene Smith’s compelling autobiography testifies to the author’s tenacious, long-term struggle to survive the soul-searing effects of the Jonestown tragedy and to forge a life-affirming prophetic witness in the aftermath.” - William L. Andrews, Adams Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Join Eugene Smith, author of Back to the World: A Life after Jonestown (whose collaborator was Blue Ear Books publisher Ethan Casey; published by TCU Press) for a virtual event hosted by the Princeton Public Library at 7pm ET/4pm PT on Wednesday, February 23, 2022.
Register here to attend the event, or visit the Princeton Public Library’s calendar listing. Here is the library’s text promoting the event:
Author Eugene Smith discusses his memoir Back to the World: A Life After Jonestownwith Christopher Fisher of The College of New Jersey’s history department.
Eugene Smith lost his mother, wife and infant son in the mass murder-suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, on Nov. 18, 1978. Repatriated by the U.S. authorities on New Year’s Eve, he broke a $50 bill stashed in his shoe to buy breakfast for himself and a fellow survivor. Approximately 70% of those who died at Jonestown were Black and yet Back to the World: A Life After Jonestown is the first book-length memoir of Peoples Temple by a Black man. The author will be in discussion with Christopher Fisher a faculty member in the history department at The College of New Jersey.
Returning to California at age 21, Smith faced the daunting challenge of building from scratch a meaningful and self-sufficient life in the American society he thought he had left behind. “My first responsibility as a survivor,” he writes, “was not to embarrass my mother or my wife or my child, and to set an example that can’t be questioned.” Smith’s story is that of a double survival: first of the destruction of the idealistic but tragically flawed Peoples Temple community, then of its aftermath.
Having survived, Smith has hard questions for today’s America. This is a memoir with powerful relevance to the deeply polarized America of today.
This provides very useful historical perspective. Sadly, days of any “moderate Republicans” are in the past. When Republican House members are censured for wanting to get to the bottom of what all was behind the Jan. 6 insurrection, hoping for even one or two moderate Republicans is a futile wish. And oh by the way what exactly makes Senators like Manchin and Sinema get them labeled “moderate”? We are living in sad times and we haven’t hit bottom yet.