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lyndon b. johnson
Voting Rights Act 'On Life Support' Amid Right-Wing Attacks
"It's time for Congress to restore its full protections by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act," said one Democratic lawmaker.
Aug 06, 2025
As the Voting Rights Act turned 60 on Wednesday, advocates highlighted right-wing attacks on the landmark legislation and called on Congress to pass a long-stagnant bill aimed at restoring and strengthening one of the most important civil rights laws in U.S. history.
The VRA, signed into law in 1965 by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson amid a groundswell of civil rights activism, was meant to ensure that state and local governments could not "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."
However, the law has been eroded in recent decades by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country, including through racially rigged and other gerrymandered congressional maps, restrictions on voter registration, reduction in early voting options, and voter identification laws. These measures disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters, and some GOP officials have admitted that they are intended to give Republican candidates an electoral edge.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated a key section of the law that required jurisdictions with a history of racist disenfranchisement to obtain federal approval prior to altering voting rules. In 2021, the nation's high court voted 5-4 in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee to uphold Arizona's voting restrictions—even as Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that they disproportionately affect minorities.
"Instead of anniversary toasts, election law experts are preparing eulogies for the landmark legislation."
Now, the Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority is poised to "end voting rights as we know them," as Mother Jones reporter Pema Levy put it Tuesday. That's because the justices said last week that they would rehear a case that could result in them striking down Section 2 of the VRA, what University of California, Los Angeles legal scholar Richard L. Hasen calls "the last remaining pillar" of the law.
"Instead of anniversary toasts, election law experts are preparing eulogies for the landmark legislation, which conservative lawyers have attacked on multiple fronts in recent years, after the U.S. Supreme Court took square aim at the statute's constitutionality last week," Jim Saksa wrote Tuesday for Democracy Docket.
As Hasen explained:
Louisiana v. Callais, the case that was the subject of last Friday's order, is a voting case over the drawing of the state's six congressional districts. Louisiana has a one-third Black population, but after the 2020 census the state Legislature drew a districting plan, passed over a Democratic governor's veto, that created only one district in which Black voters would be likely to elect their candidate of choice.
Before Callais, Black voters had successfully sued Louisiana in a case called Robinson v. Ardoin, arguing that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required drawing a second congressional district giving Black voters that opportunity. Section 2 says minority voters should have the same chance as other voters to elect their candidates of choice, and courts have long used it to require new districts when there is a large and cohesive minority population concentrated in a given area, when white and minority voters choose different candidates, and when the minority has difficulty electing its preferred representatives.
However, a group of non-Black voters argued in a lawsuit that the consideration of race in creating a second minority-majority district violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and the 15th Amendment's ban on federal and state governments denying citizens the right to vote based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
"To me, this is it," Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, a law professor at Indiana University Bloomington, told Democracy Docket. "I would bet my left arm that they will tell us that Section 2 is in violation of the 15th Amendment."
Civil rights defenders including numerous Democratic lawmakers urged Congress to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, legislation first introduced in 2021 whose sponsors said will "update and restore critical safeguards of the original Voting Rights Act."
"Sixty years ago today, the Voting Rights Act became law thanks to the perseverance of civil rights activists. Today, our sacred right to vote remains under attack," Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), one of the bill's primary sponsors, said on social media Wednesday. "We must protect our democracy and honor those who risked everything by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act."
Although the bill passed the then-Democrat controlled House of Representatives in 2021, it failed to pass the Senate and a subsequent bid to advance the legislation failed the following year.
Calling for passage of the bill, Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.)—whose home state played a critical role in the civil rights struggle—said on the social media site Bluesky that the VRA "is on life support after being gutted by the Supreme Court and far-right judges."
The Voting Rights Act was signed into law exactly 60 years ago. But today, it is on life support after being gutted by the Supreme Court and far-right judges.It’s time for Congress to restore its full protections by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. 🗳️
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— Rep. Terri A. Sewell (@sewell.house.gov) August 6, 2025 at 6:35 AM
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) said on Bluesky that "60 years ago today, the Voting Rights Act became law. Now, we have an administration conducting voter suppression in real time. In Texas, Republicans are trying to gut our democracy by redrawing maps to erase five Democratic seats—before a single vote is cast."
"The fight continues," Crockett added. "We owe it to those who marched, bled, and believed to keep pushing until every voice is heard and every vote counts."
The ACLU said: "Democracy can't wait. Congress must protect our voting rights at the federal level by passing the reintroduced John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act."
However, passing the bill will be next to impossible, given Republican control of both houses of Congress and President Donald Trump in the White House. That doesn't mean voting rights defenders should give up, Legal Defense Fund president and director-counsel Janai Nelson stressed Wednesday.
"If we are to continue the pursuit of the multiracial democracy that the VRA set in motion 60 years ago and if we are to honor our republican form of government founded on representation by the people, we must be unwavering in our commitment to fulfill the promise of Selma, refuse to cede any further ground, and mobilize in support of equal voting rights and fair elections," Nelson said.
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Why We Can't Simply Celebrate Medicare's 60th Birthday
Let's not allow President Trump and congressional Republicans to shred one of the greatest legacies of LBJ's Great Society.
Jul 30, 2025
Medicare turns 60 years old today. Former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on July 30, 1965, giving seniors a guarantee of health coverage that never existed before. Prior to Medicare's enactment, it was nearly impossible for older people to obtain health insurance, as they were considered a "bad risk."
Medicare provides universal coverage to Americans over 65 years of age. The law created Medicare Part A as a national hospital insurance program. Part B is a voluntary program for doctor visits and other medical services. Medicare Part C is another name for the privatized, for-profit version of the program called "Medicare Advantage." And Part D is the prescription drug program enacted in 2003.
The Hospital Insurance portion is funded through workers' payroll contributions. At the signing ceremony in Independence, Missouri, LBJ said, "Through this new law, every citizen will be able, in their productive years when they are earning, to insure themselves against the ravages of illness in his old age."
Lyndon Johnson paid tribute to former President Harry S. Truman, presenting him with the very first Medicare card. It was Truman who, 20 years earlier, had proposed a form of universal medical coverage for the American people.
LBJ quoted Truman's remarks from the 1940s:
Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. And the time has now arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection.
It turned out that the time had not yet arrived. Truman's proposal failed to gain traction during a time of retrenchment from the expansions of the New Deal, and a Republican majority on Capitol Hill which he famously labeled the "Do-Nothing Congress."
President Johnson's determination to enact his Great Society agenda (of which Medicare was a large part) and sheer political muscle—not to mention solid Democratic control of Congress—pushed Medicare (and its sister program, Medicaid) into being.
Naturally, Medicare faced strong opposition from conservatives. None other than Ronald Reagan made the ludicrous prediction that if Medicare were enacted, "You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Sixty years later, we are no less "free" because of Medicare. In fact, having guaranteed healthcare makes seniors and people with disabilities (and their families) much more free—from disease, from worry, and financial ruin.
Today, 68 million people rely on Medicare for health coverage, including 12 million who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare isn't perfect: The for-profit Medicare Advantage (Part C) program is extremely problematic (see below). The Medicare Part A trust fund will become depleted in 2033 if Congress fails to take action to strengthen it. Traditional Medicare still doesn't cover basic hearing, vision, and dental care—which we have been pushing for many years. But most concerning of all—President Donald Trump and his party have spent this 60th anniversary year actively undermining both Medicare and Medicaid.
The "Unfair, Ugly" bill that Trump signed earlier this month slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, which will strip health coverage from an estimated 10 to 16 million lower-income Americans. The new law—projected to add some $4 trillion to the national debt—could trigger cuts to Medicare down the road.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is recklessly taking steps to privatize the entire Medicare program. It has announced a pilot project to involve private companies in conducting prior authorizations for care in traditional Medicare. The administration, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz, also has announced a plan to automatically enroll new Medicare beneficiaries in the for-profit Medicare Advantage (MA) program—a huge gift to the multibillion dollar insurance industry at the expense of patients.
The problems with Medicare Advantage (MA) have become legendary. Enrollees are basically put into health maintenance organizations run by insurance giants, with limited networks of providers. Unreasonable denials of care are rampant. Patients who become disenchanted with MA plans often find it nearly impossible to switch to traditional Medicare. Meanwhile, some MA Insurers have been overcharging the government for their services and ripping off taxpayers. (Several of these companies are currently under investigation.)
We are watching to see if the Trump administration, which talks a good game about lowering prescription medication costs while simultaneously doing favors for Big Pharma, will honor the provisions of President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which made myriad patient-friendly reforms to the Part D drug program—including out of pocket caps for beneficiaries and empowering Medicare to negotiate prices with the industry.
The bottom line is: Let's not allow President Trump and congressional Republicans to shred one of the greatest legacies of LBJ's Great Society. We and our fellow advocacy groups are pushing back—and so is the grassroots "Hands Off" movement. But we don't want to be fighting this same battle every time Medicare (and Medicaid) mark an anniversary when we should be purely celebrating.
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How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington.
Apr 30, 2025
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest anti-war protest so far. An early edition of the next day’s New York Times arrived on newsstands with a big headline at the top of the front page that said “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War.” I heard someone say, “Johnson will have to listen to us now.”
But President Lyndon Johnson dashed the hopes of those who marched from Central Park to the United Nations that day (with an actual turnout later estimated at 400,000). He kept escalating the war in Vietnam, while secretly also bombing Laos and Cambodia.
During the years that followed, anti-war demonstrations grew in thousands of communities across the United States. The decentralized Moratorium Day events on October 15, 1969 drew upward of 2 million people. But all forms of protest fell on deaf official ears. A song by the folksinger Donovan, recorded midway through the decade, became more accurate and powerful with each passing year: “The War Drags On.”
By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
As the war continued, so did the fading of trust in the wisdom and morality of Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Gallup polls gauged the steep credibility drop. In 1965, just 24% of Americans said involvement in the Vietnam War had been a mistake. By the spring of 1971, the figure was 61%.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam gradually diminished from the peak of 536,100 in 1968, but ground operations and massive U.S. bombing persisted until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in late January 1973. American forces withdrew from Vietnam, but the war went on with U.S. support for 27 more months, until—on April 30, 1975—the final helicopter liftoff from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon signaled that the Vietnam War was indeed over.
By then, most Americans were majorly disillusioned. Optimism that public opinion would sway their government’s leaders on matters of war and peace had been steadily crushed while carnage in Southeast Asia continued. To many citizens, democracy had failed—and the failure seemed especially acute to students, whose views on the war had evolved way ahead of overall opinion.
At the end of the 1960s, Gallup found “significantly more opposition to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies” among students at public and private colleges than in “a parallel survey of the U.S. general public: 44% vs. 25%, respectively.” The same poll “showed 69% of students in favor of slowing down or halting the fighting in Vietnam, while only 20% favored escalation. This was a sharp change from 1967, when more students favored escalation (49%) than deescalation (35%).”
Six decades later, it took much less time for young Americans to turn decisively against their government’s key role of arming Israel’s war on Gaza. By a wide margin, continuous huge shipments of weapons to the Israeli military swiftly convinced most young adults that the U.S. government was complicit in a relentless siege taking the lives of Palestinian civilians on a large scale.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in June 2024 found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61-39%. Opposition to the arms shipments was even higher among young people. For adults under age 30, the ratio was 77-23.
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington. No civics textbook could prepare students for the realities of power that kept the nation’s war machine on a rampage, taking several million lives in Southeast Asia or supplying weapons making possible genocide in Gaza.
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Donald Trump now, President Joe Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without letup.
No campaign-trail platitudes about caring and joy could make up for a lack of decency. By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
A pair of exchanges on network television, 56 years apart, are eerily similar.
In August 1968, appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” Humphrey was asked, “On what points, if any, do you disagree with the Vietnam policies of President Johnson?”
“I think that the policies that the president has pursued are basically sound,” Humphrey replied.
In October 2024, appearing on the ABC program “The View,” Harris was asked: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
Young people’s votes for Harris last fall were just 54%, compared with 60% that they provided to Biden four years earlier.
Many young eyes recognized the war policy positions of Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris as immoral. Their decisions to stay on a war train clashed with youthful idealism. And while hardboiled political strategists opted to discount such idealism as beside the electoral point, the consequences have been truly tragic—and largely foreseeable.
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The Dangerous Silence on Nuclear War 60 Years After Famous 'Daisy Ad'
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech in Chicago, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Sep 09, 2024
One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.
The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.
Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.
His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”
- YouTubeyoutu.be
So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop -- and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.
Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.
Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.
Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.
Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.
“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.
Two decades after the summit that defrosted the Cold War and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”
Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.
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Is the Ghost of Hubert Humphrey Stalking Kamala Harris?
As a pivotal election neared, a candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting an unpopular war or speak out for a meaningful change. Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Harris faces it now.
Aug 15, 2024
After the Democrat in the White House decided not to run for reelection, the vice president got the party’s presidential nod—and continued to back the administration’s policies for an unpopular war. As the election neared, the candidate had to decide whether to keep supporting the war or speak out for a change.
Hubert Humphrey faced that choice in 1968. Kamala Harris faces it now.
Despite the differences in eras and circumstances, key dynamics are eerily similar. The history of how Vice President Humphrey navigated the political terrain of the war in Vietnam has ominous parallels with how Vice President Harris has been dealing with the war in Gaza.
From Landslide to Chaos
For millions of liberals, during the first half of the 1960s, Hubert Humphrey was the nation’s most heroic politician. As the Senate majority whip, he deftly championed landmark bills for civil rights and social programs. By the time President Lyndon B. Johnson put him on the Democratic ticket in 1964, progressive momentum was in high gear.
LBJ defeated ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater in a landslide. As vice president, Humphrey assisted Johnson to follow up on the 1964 Civil Rights Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a huge set of antipoverty measures while enacting broad social programs in realms of education, health care, nutrition, housing and the environment. Midway through the summer of 1965, Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law.
The chaos and bitterness in Chicago underscored how the vice president’s deference to the war president had weakened the party while undermining the chances for victory.
Meanwhile, escalation of the U.S. war on Vietnam was taking off. And, as Martin Luther King Jr. soon pointed out, “When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer. We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don’t even get good oleo [margarine]. These are facts of life.”
At first, Vice President Humphrey wrote slightly dovish memos to Johnson, who angrily rejected the advice and retaliated by excluding him from key meetings. Banished to the doghouse, Humphrey licked his wounds and changed his approach. By early 1966, he was deferring to Johnson’s war views in private and advocating for the Vietnam War in public.
As the war escalated, so did the vice president’s zeal to extol it as a fight for freedom and democracy. “By 1967 he had become a hawk on Vietnam,” biographer Arnold Offner noted. Beneath the lofty rhetoric was cold calculation.
“Humphrey’s passage from dove to hawk on Vietnam was not the result of one-sided White House briefings or of his ability, as one journalist had noted, to see silver linings in the stormiest clouds,” Offner wrote. “His change of position derived from a case of willful mind over matter, from his strong anti-Communism combined with political expediency driven by ambition, namely desire to remain in Johnson’s good graces and perhaps succeed him whenever his presidency ended.”
That desire to be in the president’s good graces did not dissipate after Johnson suddenly announced in a televised address on March 31, 1968 that he would not seek reelection. Four weeks later, Humphrey launched a presidential campaign that pitted him against two antiwar candidates, Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.
From the outset, Humphrey was plagued by his fear of antagonizing Johnson if he were to depart from a pro-war script. The United States had “nothing to apologize for,” Humphrey said. He didn’t run in any primaries and was not willing to debate McCarthy or Kennedy.
Humphrey mouthed the same old rhetoric to rationalize the administration’s policies for the war in Vietnam. Several high-level supporters—including Iowa’s Governor Harold Hughes, Vermont’s Governor Philip Hoff, and the venerable former New York governor and ambassador Averell Harriman—advised him to resign the vice presidency and thus free himself from entanglement with Johnson. But to Humphrey, such a step was unthinkable.
And so, Hubert Humphrey rode in the caboose of the war train all summer. In late August, the day before the Democratic National Convention got underway in Chicago, he told viewers of the CBS program Face the Nation that the administration’s policies in Vietnam were “basically sound.”
The convention nominated him while, outside, tear gas filled the air during what a report from a special federal commission later called a police riot that meted out violence to antiwar demonstrators as well as some journalists. Inside the turbulent convention, dissenting delegates were outshouted, outvoted and suppressed by the pro-Humphrey forces.
The chaos and bitterness in Chicago underscored how the vice president’s deference to the war president had weakened the party while undermining the chances for victory. In polls, Humphrey trailed the Republican candidate Richard Nixon by double digits.
And yet, like a true warhorse, the VP could not bring himself to break from the president’s steely insistence on maintaining the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. The Democratic ticket of Humphrey and Maine’s senator Edmund Muskie was in a tailspin, propelled downward by Humphrey’s refusal to break ranks with Johnson.
It wasn’t until Sept. 30 that Humphrey took a meaningful step. His campaign bought 30 minutes of national TV air time on NBC, and he used it to deliver a speech that finally created a bit of daylight between him and Johnson’s war. Humphrey said that as president he’d be willing to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. The speech revived his campaign, which nearly closed the gap with Nixon in October. But it was too little, too late.
Trying to Square a Circle of Mass Murder With the 'Politics of Joy'?
Like Hubert Humphrey six decades ago, Kamala Harris has remained in step with the man responsible for changing her title from senator to vice president. She has toed President Biden’s war line, while at times voicing sympathy for the victims of the Gaza war that’s made possible by policies that she supports. Her words of compassion have yet to translate into opposing the pipeline of weapons and ammunition to the Israeli military as it keeps slaughtering Palestinian civilians.
As the Democratic standard-bearer during carnage in Gaza, Harris has been trying to square a circle of mass murder, expressing empathy for victims while staying within bounds of U.S. government policies. Last week, Harris had her national security adviser declare that “she does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”
Like Hubert Humphrey six decades ago, Kamala Harris has remained in step with the man responsible for changing her title from senator to vice president
If maintained, that stance will continue to be a moral catastrophe—while increasing the chances that Harris will lose to Donald Trump. In effect, so far, Harris has opted to stay aligned with power brokers, big donors and conventional political wisdom instead of aligning with most voters. A CBS News/YouGov poll in June found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61 to 39 percent.
Last week, Harris described herself and running-mate Tim Walz as “joyful warriors.” Many outlets have heralded their joyride along the campaign trail. The Associated Press reported that “Harris is pushing joy.” A New York Times headline proclaimed that “joy is fueling her campaign.” The brand of the Harris campaign is fast becoming “the politics of joy.”
Such branding will be a sharp contrast to the outcries from thousands of protesters in Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention next week, as they denounce U.S. complicity with the methodical killing of so many children, women and other civilians in Gaza.
Campaigning for joy while supporting horrendous warfare is nothing new. Fifty-six years before Vice President Harris called herself a “joyful warrior,” Vice President Humphrey declared that he stood for the “politics of joy” when announcing his run for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination.
At that point, the Pentagon was several years into its massive killing spree in Vietnam, as Humphrey kicked off his campaign by saying: “here we are the spirit of dedication, here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy; and that’s the way it’s going to be, all the way, too, from here on out.”
If Kamala Harris loses to Trump after sticking with her support for arming the slaughter in Gaza, historians will likely echo words from biographer Offner, who wrote that after the 1968 election Humphrey “asked himself repeatedly whether he should have distanced himself sooner from President Johnson on the war. The answer was all too obvious.”
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Blank Checks for War: Congress Has Abdicated Its Power From Tonkin to Gaza
As the 60th anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution approaches, it’s time to reflect on how Congress solidified its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy and how the people can make their voices heard.
Aug 01, 2024
With the U.S.- backed carnage in Gaza continuing and the threat of growing violence looming throughout the region (in Lebanon, Iran, and who knows where else), we need to think more deeply than ever about how the American people have historically been excluded from foreign policy decision-making. An upcoming anniversary should remind us of what sent us down this undemocratic path.
Sixty years ago, on August 7, 1964, U.S. Congress handed President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to wage a major war in Vietnam, solidifying its long-standing deference to the presidency on foreign policy. Not once since World War II has Congress exercised its constitutional responsibility to vote on declarations to decide if, when, and where the United States goes to war.
The Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 flew through Congress, in part because most members trusted the president’s assurance that he sought “no wider war.” Their trust was misplaced. The Johnson administration kept secret and lied about its plans for future military escalation in Vietnam. It also lied about the incident used to persuade Congress to give LBJ a blank check to use military force however he wanted: the false claim that American ships had been the targets of unprovoked and unequivocal attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats.
We have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully.
In fact, the United States had been fighting a secret war against North Vietnam since 1961. The U.S. destroyers that LBJ said were innocently sailing on the “high seas” were there to support South Vietnamese attacks (organized by the U.S. military and CIA) on North Vietnamese coastal villages. On August 2, 1964, these ongoing acts of war finally provoked a few Vietnamese patrol boats to chase after a U.S. destroyer which, firing first, easily disabled the small vessels. The Vietnamese managed to fire a few torpedoes but missed. There were no American casualties. Not exactly Pearl Harbor.
What’s more, the White House also claimed it had “unequivocal” evidence that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked again on August 4. In fact, the U.S. commander on the scene sent a “flash message” urging civilian authorities to delay any decision—because what first seemed like an attack may have been a false alarm caused by “freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonarmen.” Within days it was all but certain that no second attack had occurred. As President Johnson said to an aide, “Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!”
Nonetheless, Johnson went on television near midnight on August 4 to announce that it was his “duty” to launch a “retaliatory” airstrike. As he spoke, 64 U.S. warplanes were on their way to bomb North Vietnam. The next day LBJ asked Congress for a resolution giving him the authority “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.” We now know that the heart of this resolution had been drafted months earlier. The administration had just been waiting for a pretext to ram it through Congress.
We also know the lies didn’t stop there. That fall, as Johnson campaigned for the presidency, he sounded like a peace candidate, promising that he would not send “our boys to do the fighting for Asian boys.” Running against pro-war Republican Barry Goldwater, LBJ won in a landslide. Americans voted for peace and ended up with a war that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.
Virtually every top U.S. foreign policy official knew the Johnson administration was lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, including 33-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. By chance, Ellsberg’s first full day on the job, as one of Robert McNamara’s Pentagon “whiz kids,” was August 4, 1964. Ellsberg was then a Cold War hawk who supported the U.S. mission in Vietnam. Like all his colleagues, he raised no internal objections to Johnson’s airstrikes or the administration’s effort to sell the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through deceit. And no insider gave a second’s thought to revealing those lies to Congress, the media, or the public.
After a year in the Pentagon, nearly two years in Vietnam, and two more years meeting young anti-war activists and intensely studying the 7,000-page top-secret history of decision-making in Vietnam that became known as the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg underwent a dramatic political and moral conversion. By 1967, he believed the war an unwinnable stalemate from which the U.S. should find a face-saving exit. By 1969, he regarded it as fundamentally immoral and unjust, and thought the U.S. should withdraw unilaterally and immediately.
At that point, Ellsberg decided to photocopy the Pentagon Papers and make them public, hoping that their sordid record of government lying would further ignite anti-war activism. He did so with the knowledge that it might bring him a life sentence in prison. First Ellsberg tried to persuade anti-war senators to put the Pentagon Papers into the public record. When that effort failed, he took the papers to The New York Times and 18 other newspapers. Each of them published substantial portions in June 1971.
Later that year, Ellsberg spoke with former Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two members of Congress who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. They talked about the documents in the Pentagon Papers that contained detailed evidence of the Johnson administration’s lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Morse said to Ellsberg, “If you’d given me those documents, at the time, in 1964, the Tonkin Gulf Resolution would never have gotten out of committee. And if they had brought it to the floor, it would have lost.”
You can’t replay history, so we can’t test Morse’s claim, but Ellsberg has many times said that the greatest regret of his life was not exposing the government’s lies about Vietnam much earlier. There were many reasons why he didn’t, and why so few officials ever expose national security wrongdoing. The biggest reason, Ellsberg came to realize, was the intense culture of power, loyalty, and careerism that characterizes foreign policy circles. Almost no one in those positions, even those who have serious objections to ongoing policies, is willing to risk their insider status and their access to power and privileged information. Most fully internalize the arrogant assumption that the foreign policy elite understands far better than Congress or the people how the world works and how the U.S. should exercise its power.
And Congress, for its part, continues to enable an ever more imperial presidency that decides when and where the U.S. goes to war. It almost never uses the power of the purse to reduce U.S. militarism or to cut funding for unpopular wars. The nearly trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is rubber-stamped every year. There is no guarantee that a more engaged Congress would give us a less militarized and interventionist foreign policy. But it would make that policy more accountable to a public which historically has been substantially more anti-war than its representatives. As in the Vietnam era, a majority of Americans opposed the 21st century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan many years before they ended. And since at least March 2024 a majority of Americans have opposed the Israeli government’s war on Gaza, yet Congress continues to bankroll U.S. support for it.
We have seen, in the last 10 months, an unprecedented outpouring of American protest in support of Palestinian rights. For good reason. Nearly 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, and many of them children, have been killed by the Israeli military’s indiscriminate and disproportionate response to the Hamas killing of some 1,100 Israelis on October 7, 2023. Around 1.7% of the Gazan population (2.3 million) have been killed and at least 90% displaced from their homes (many have had to flee multiple times). A recent study by the medical journal The Lancet, estimates that the death toll in Gaza could reach 186,000 even if there is a cease-fire today.
For most Americans, this level of suffering is unimaginable. Yet we must try to imagine it. If we were Gaza, at least 5.7 million of us would be dead, the vast majority women, children, and other civilians. Many millions more would be among the uncounted dead and dying—buried, lost, sick, starving. More than 300 million of us would be forced from our homes, on the road seeking shelter, food, and water under ongoing military attacks and perils beyond description.
That is the reality in Gaza.
In the end, only a mass democratic movement has the potential to dramatically change U.S. foreign policy. The first challenge is to overthrow the baseless claim that the United States is the greatest force for good in the world, the “indispensable nation” that stands for the rule of law, freedom, and democracy. Our record does not warrant such a delusion. Only when that ideology and naïve faith is broadly undermined can we hope to chip away at the long-standing infrastructure of U.S. militarism—the over 750 military bases on foreign soil, the annual military exercises in two-thirds of the world’s nations, and the “defense” budget that equals the next nine most militarized nations combined.
Ellsberg and Morse were right. The people must know the truth. But we have long had more than enough evidence to demand fundamental changes in U.S. foreign policy. We can’t wait for Congress to represent us faithfully. The people’s voice must be heard.
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Gaza Is a Stain on Biden’s Legacy; Here’s How He Can Start to Make Amends
Like Lyndon B. Johnson, Biden committed a foreign policy mistake that threw his significant domestic wins into the shade.
Jul 22, 2024
Presidents have two major legacies, on domestic policy and on foreign policy. Big foreign policy mistakes can throw even gargantuan domestic wins into the shade. President Lyndon Baines Johnson reshaped the United States with his Great Society programs, and at least acquiesced in finally ending Jim Crow racial discrimination. Johnson’s obsession with winning the Vietnam War and his investment in the false “domino theory” of the spread of Communism, however, doomed his presidency and harmed the United States for decades.
I’m old, so I remember as a teenager watching Johnson on March 31, 1968 come on television and announce that he would not seek another term in office. Unfortunately, the Vietnam War would grind on until 1972, taking two million or more Vietnamese lives and 58,220 U.S. military casualties. By 1975 the U.S. would withdraw entirely, amid chaos.
I was reminded of LBJ’s resignation speech by U.S. President Joe Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he would not seek another term.
Biden’s extreme backing for Netanyahu’s genocide has left an indelible stain on his presidency and has harmed U.S. diplomacy around the world.
Much to the annoyance of my leftist friends, I once suggested that Biden would be the most consequential president since Lyndon Johnson. I’m reprinting my reasoning below. Those achievements, however, were domestic.
Like Johnson, Biden has provoked massive campus protests by going all in on a ruinous foreign misadventure. In Biden’s case, the great white whale has been the destruction of Hamas, and his albatross has been his “bear hug” of the extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden has resupplied Israel with ammunition and weaponry in real time to allow Netanyahu and his far, far right cronies (the Israeli equivalents of Neo-Nazis) to destroy much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and to kill over 38,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Biden’s State Department has avoided concluding that Israel has misused U.S. weaponry to commit war crimes, making a mockery of the Leahy Act. Biden has attempted to create a U.S. shield of impunity for Netanyahu, even calling a United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolution “nonbinding” (it was binding). The International Criminal Court found on January 26 that South Africa’s genocide case against Israel was plausibly brought and ordered a halt to such activities, but to no effect. Biden himself disputed the numbers of dead Palestinians at first, but later admitted that 30,000 had been killed, going on to say, “It must not be 60,000.” He drew a red line around Rafah, but Netanyahu made a laughingstock out of him by simply ignoring U.S. strictures and destroying Rafah the way he had previously destroyed Gaza City.
Biden’s extreme backing for Netanyahu’s genocide has left an indelible stain on his presidency and has harmed U.S. diplomacy around the world.
The president has only a few months to make at least some amends for his catastrophic Gaza policy. He should restore funding to the U.N. Reliefs and Works Agency, which Israel falsely accused of being a Hamas front. Even Britain has restored funding, but Biden remains the odd man out.
Biden should cut off shipments to Israel of further munitions unless Netanyahu gets out of Gaza and lets the Palestine Authority move in to govern it.
Biden should massively sanction the Israeli enterprise of squatting on ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank.
As for his domestic legacy, I wrote in 2022:
Biden came into office under the cloud of the pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s lackadaisical response to it, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is true that Biden had the advantage that the vaccines had been developed, in part with Trump’s investment in Moderna. (Pfizer marketed the German Biontech vaccine). But under Trump, few federal resources had been mobilized and one leak suggested that Jared Kushner deliberately hurt New York’s response to punish it for voting Democratic.
Biden mobilized the U.S. military to provide vaccinators, because there were too few civilian ones, and coordinated with states and localities. In six months he got those adults vaccinated who were willing, and began the process whereby getting Covid-19 for most of people was no longer life-threatening. As for the die hard Trumpist old people who refuse to get vaccinated, they are harming themselves and those around them.
Biden’s pandemic intervention is estimated to have saved a million lives.
Biden put America back to work, getting the unemployment rate down to levels not seen since the Woodstock Music Festival and the craze for paisley.
So much production had temporarily cut back during the pandemic that when consumers wanted to buy again, there were bottlenecks that caused inflation. These supply problems are easing, though prices of staples remain too high. In some instances, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine caused spikes that won’t be easy to overcome, both in energy prices and in wheat prices. Still, gasoline prices have fallen steadily for two months now.
Biden charged the Department of the Interior to jumpstart the U.S. offshore wind industry, with a goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030, by leasing federal waters offshore to private companies. We will see some new, enormous wind farms come on line in as little as four years, some of the biggest in the world.
Biden glad-handed and wheedled to get the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, which will among other things build out electric vehicle charging stations throughout the country and help schools buy electric buses, along with investments in bridges (10% of which seem to be on the verge of falling down) and other key infrastructure. It even has $65 billion in it to ease access for all Americans to the internet, which should increase productivity.
Biden got a new industrial policy with the $52 billion in the CHIPS Act for revving up a U.S.-based semi-conductor industry, which is key to progress in fighting climate change, as well. He arranged funding for veterans suffering the after-effects of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.
...He succeeded in encouraging Democrats in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act... with $369 billion for the green energy transition. It will also make seniors’ medicines cheaper and help the 40% of the country stricken by long-term drought owing to the climate emergency adopt resiliency measures.
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As Medicare Turns 58, It Still Must Be Protected and Expanded
Despite the demise of Build Back Better, we should not give up on expanding traditional Medicare. Real change takes time and persistence.
Jul 31, 2023
President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law 58 years ago Sunday—on July 30, 1965. Before Medicare, most American seniors could not obtain health insurance; they had to rely on charity or help from relatives with medical bills.
"Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and to enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness,” said President Johnson at the signing ceremony. “And the time has now arrived to help them attain that opportunity and to help them get that protection."
Medicare was modeled on a typical Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan in 1965. The average health insurance plan 58 years ago did not include hearing, vision, or dental coverage. As Kaiser Health News points out, “Back in 1965, life expectancy was lower and health care (including dental) was more affordable.”
“When Medicare was created, its architects assumed expansion… in terms of benefits. (But) they didn’t anticipate the shift in American politics to the right.”
Today, life expectancy is longer and healthcare costs have skyrocketed. But traditional Medicare still does not cover hearing, vision, and dental care—leaving beneficiaries to bear the full cost of care for their ears, eyes, and teeth. Hearing aids, dental crowns, and eyeglasses can amount to thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses, which many seniors simply can’t afford.
President Joe Biden’s original Build Back Better plan finally would have added hearing, vision, and dental coverage to traditional Medicare. The White House ultimately dropped dental and vision care from its plan after objections from Democratic centrists, leaving hearing coverage as the only potential benefit expansion. Then, the entire Build Back Better plan was killed at the end of 2021 when Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) withdrew his support, effectively ending any real chance to expand traditional Medicare benefits while Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.
As Jonathan Oberlander, professor of health policy at UNC-Chapel Hill, observed, “Medicare is the kind of program where you’d expect the benefits to be expanded over and over again.” But other than the addition of Part D prescription drug coverage (administered by private plans) in 2003, Medicare benefits have not been expanded in the 58 years since the program was enacted.
“When Medicare was created, its architects assumed expansion… in terms of benefits,” Oberlander told Kaiser Health News. “(But) they didn’t anticipate the shift in American politics to the right.” This shift, which took root with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981, emphasized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, increased military spending, and spouted a lot of bluster about reducing deficits (hard to accomplish given the first two items on the list).
What President Biden called “human infrastructure”—services for everyday Americans struggling to thrive in a global economy amid growing wealth inequality—became a tougher political sell after 1981. The ill-fated Build Back Better plan was an earnest attempt to begin investing more resources in “human infrastructure.” Despite the demise of Build Back Better, we should not give up on expanding traditional Medicare. Real change takes time and persistence.
In fact, there has been real progress on Medicare in other ways. The Inflation Reduction Act (the reconstituted version of Build Back Better) finally allows Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices with Big Pharma—an historic reform that took some 20 years to enact. The Inflation Reduction Act will cap beneficiaries’ out of pocket drug costs at $2,000 per year (starting in 2025), limits seniors’ insulin costs to $35 a month, and penalizes drug-makers for raising prices above the rate of inflation.
While Congress was unable to enact a hearing benefit for traditional Medicare enrollees, legislation introduced by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) required the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to create a rule greatly expanding access to over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids, which the FDA did in 2022. These OTC products (suitable for mild-to-moderate hearing loss) can be significantly less expensive than prescription hearing aids. And while the president’s proposed dental benefit for traditional Medicare did not survive the legislative process, the Biden administration has expanded the definition of “medically necessary” dental care under Medicare Part B.
A 2021 study by Kaiser Family Foundation indicated that MA customers “still generally end up with significant out-of-pocket costs” for hearing, dental, and vision care.
Some Medicare Advantage (MA) plans do offer hearing, dental, and vision coverage—but those benefits are extremely modest and don’t always make up for the disadvantages of Medicare Advantage. Many MA insurers are under investigation for overbilling the government, denying authorizations for reasonable medical procedures, and misleading customers through celebrity ad campaigns. Meanwhile, Medicare Advantage plans restrict beneficiaries to limited networks of providers and sometimes don’t cover medical care outside of a patient’s home region.
A 2021 study by Kaiser Family Foundation indicated that MA customers “still generally end up with significant out-of-pocket costs” for hearing, dental, and vision care. “It stands to reason there would be lower out-of-pocket spending in Medicare Advantage than in traditional Medicare, but the differences are not as large as one might expect,” Tricia Neuman, a senior vice president at Kaiser Family Foundation, told Kaiser Health News.
These privatized Medicare plans, which unfortunately are growing in market share under the power of their advertising (boosted by a pro-MA bias during the Trump administration), were not part of the original vision for Medicare when President Johnson signed it into law. Traditional Medicare is the bedrock program which has provided seniors with health security since 1965. It must be preserved—and expanded—in accordance with the real needs of 21st century seniors.
On this 58th anniversary of Medicare, let’s recommit to President Johnson’s promise of the “opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health” and provide “security against the economic effects of sickness.”
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House Dems Call for Suspension of Aid if Brazilian Military Attempts Election Coup
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's far-right president, has said he may not accept the results of this October's presidential contest if he loses.
Jul 07, 2022
Amid fears that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro could attempt a military coup if he loses this October's presidential contest, a group of U.S. congressional Democrats this week proposed a measure that would suspend security aid to Brazil if its armed forces intervene in the election.
Brasilwire's Brian Mier first reported that Reps. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), Albio Sires (D-N.J.), Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Susan Wild (D-Pa.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2023 which, if approved, would require the secretary of state "to review actions by Brazilian armed forces related to that country's October 2022 presidential elections and to consider such actions under statutory guardrails on U.S. security assistance."
"It calls for the discontinuation of security assistance," an insider with knowledge of the measure told Mier. Such assistance to Brazil consists mostly of joint military exercises and six-figure financial support. U.S. President Joe Biden has requested $800,000 in international military education and training funds for Brazil next fiscal year.
The unnamed insider characterized the proposed NDAA amendment as "basically a way of saying, 'you need to consider whether these actions amount to a coup because, if so, that would necessitate cutting off U.S. assistance.'"
As Bolsonaro and his allies continue their unfounded attacks on the integrity of Brazil's electronic voting system, recent polls show him trailing former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva--who is running for the office again after being cleared of corruption charges last year--by double digits.
Bolsonaro, who decades ago declared his intention to stage a coup if he was ever elected president, has said he may not accept the results of the election if he loses under the current voting system.
His running mate, Walter Braga Netto, recently told a group of Brazilian business leaders that the armed forces will not honor the results of October's election unless the Superior Election Court changes the ballot system.
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The last time there was a military coup in Brazil--many progressive observers consider the 2016 impeachment and ouster of former President Dilma Rousseff, also of da Silva's leftist Workers' Party, a political coup--it was backed by the United States.
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a naval task force to the South American country as far-right elements of the Brazilian military deposed Joao Goulart, the democratically elected president, and his progressive government. Two decades of military dictatorship followed. The regime's forces were trained--including in torture--by U.S. agents.
Bolsonaro, a former army paratrooper who rose through the ranks during and after the dictatorship, has repeatedly praised the brutal regime, under which tens of thousands of people were tortured, murdered, and disappeared. He also infamously honored as a "national hero" a former army officer who tortured Rousseff when she was a young resistance fighter.
While serving as Bolsonaro's defense minister, Braga Netto--who rose to the rank of army captain during the dictatorship--once released an official statement arguing that the 1964 coup should be "understood and celebrated."
Marcelo Rubens Paiva--a Brazilian writer whose father, Rubens Paiva, was disappeared by the military dictatorship in 1971--tweeted earlier this week that Bolosnaro chose Braga Netto as his running mate "not to raise or aggregate votes, but to consolidate his power, with someone obedient and allied to a coup."
A group of Brazilian Jewish academics, jurists, and politicians this week published a manifesto calling on voters to "defeat Nazi sympathizers" by voting for da Silva in the first round, for "if there is a second round, [Bolsonaro] points to the possibility of a military coup."
"Bolsonaro made it very clear that he is not just any extremist," they wrote. "In his statements, he showed his contempt for women, Blacks, Indigenous people, LGBT+, and all minorities, and his willingness to fight--if possible to destroy--everything that was not in accordance with their militia lifestyle and pining for fascism."
The manifesto cited Bolsonaro's "deconstruction of human rights, salary squeezes and high prices, [and] contempt for science--which officially claimed the lives of almost 700,000 people" during the Covid-19 pandemic.
It also notes the return of hunger--which was largely eradicated during the Lula and Rousseff administrations--the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and murder of its Indigenous inhabitants and defenders, and the "gradual strangulation" of the press.
"We have reached the point where all of this can change," the statement's signers asserted. "The elections are approaching, although the militiamen--street or digital--organize themselves to silence the polls and the justice system."
"The polls will be the battleground and the vote our weapon," they added. "We have the obligation and the challenge to defeat fascism."
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Advocates Cheer Senate Reintroduction of John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act
Bill co-sponsor Sen. Raphael Warnock said the proposed legislation "carries on the legacy of Congressman Lewis' work to protect the sacred right to vote."
Oct 05, 2021
Democracy defenders on Tuesday cheered the U.S. Senate's reintroduction of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a bill passed by the House of Representatives in August that would revive key provisions of the weakened Voting Rights Act and honor the legacy of the civil rights icon after whom it is named.
"We cannot claim to honor the life of John Lewis if we refuse to carry on his life's work."
"As a proud son of the great state of Georgia and a voice for our state here in this chamber, I am deeply honored to join my colleagues here today to introduce this important legislation in honor of one of Georgia's and America's most influential public servants," said bill co-sponsor Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) from the Senate floor. "This bill... carries on the legacy of Congressman Lewis' work to protect the sacred right to vote."
Senate President Pro Tempore Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), another co-sponsor, said that Lewis--a Georgia Democrat who served 17 terms in the House while keeping up civil rights activism spanning eight decades before his death in July 2020 at age 80--called voting "the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union."
"He was right. And that's why we cannot stand idly by while states engage in flagrant suppression schemes to take this tool away from marginalized communities," Leahy added. "The House already passed the companion to the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act... Now we must do our part. We cannot claim to honor the life of John Lewis if we refuse to carry on his life's work."
If passed, the proposed legislation would restore the full protections of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Signed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson following years of nonviolent but frequently deadly civil rights activism--including a young John Lewis being beaten nearly to death in Selma, Alabama months before its passage--the VRA was meant to ensure that state and local governments could not "deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."
However, the VRA has been systematically eroded in recent decades by Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country. Restrictions on voter registration, reductions in early voting options, and the implementation of voter identification laws have disproportionately disenfranchised minority voters. Some GOP officials have admitted that such moves are intended to give Republican candidates an electoral edge.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the VRA in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a key section of the law that required jurisdictions with a history of racist disenfranchisement to obtain federal approval prior to altering voting rules.
In July, the nation's high court voted 5-4 in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee to uphold Arizona's voting restrictions, even as Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that they disproportionately affect minorities.
This year alone, Republican lawmakers in 49 states have introduced over 400 bills with provisions that restrict voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Governors have signed at least 18 of the measures into law.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris joined members of Congress and civil rights advocates in welcoming the Senate's reintroduction of the bill and urging its passage.
Wade Henderson, interim president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement that "for our democracy to work for all of us, it must include us all--no matter our color, party, or zip code. That is why it is vital Congress address the Supreme Court's dangerous decision in the Shelby County case and restore the federal government's ability to stop racially discriminatory voting practices."
"With more than 400 bills introduced in states across the country to silence millions of voters, the Senate must move quickly to put into place a transparent process for protecting everyone's freedom to vote," Henderson continued. "The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would help identify barriers that could silence Black, Latino, Indigenous, young, and new Americans and ensure we all have an equal say in the decisions that impact our lives."
Karen Hobert Flynn, president of the advocacy group Common Cause, said that the bill "has already been passed by the House, and it is critical that the Senate follow suit."
"The legislation will repair much of the damage done to the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts," she added. "In concert with the Freedom to Vote Act, this legislation will curb the coordinated effort by Republican state legislatures across the country to silence Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian American Pacific Islander voters who showed up to vote in the 2020 elections in record numbers."
While the legislation faces an uphill battle in the chamber due to some Democrats' refusal to abolish the filibuster, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) vowed Tuesday that "the Senate will vote on this vital bill."
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