Why Voting Rights Can't Be Bipartisan
As the U.S. Senate grapples with voting rights legislation, some lawmakers and observers fret it would be a mistake for Democrats to protect voting rights on a party-line vote. This is a hesitation that I share: I run a nonpartisan organization that works to strengthen democracy, and we always aim for support from lawmakers from both parties.
However, I’ve spent years researching the history of the fight for voting rights, and I see a clear if unexpected pattern: Most of the time in U.S. history, voting rights were expanded by one party over the objections of the other. When it comes to who gets to participate fully in American democracy, the parties don’t hug it out, they duke it out. In fact, voting rights usually has proven a poor arena for bipartisanship.
In the first great fight for the vote in the 1820s, for example, Democrats expanded the franchise to poor and working-class white men — ending the property requirement that dated from colonial times. In New York State, canny Albany insider Martin Van Buren assembled an aspirational coalition of what he called “this class of men, composed of mechanics, professional men, and small landholders and constituting the bone, pith, and muscle of the population of the state.” Democrats rammed through an expanded franchise over Whig opposition in New York and around the country, leading to a doubling of turnout and the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency.
In 1842, it was the Whigs who passed the most significant legislation on congressional redistricting, reorganizing the House of Representatives into single-member districts instead of lawmakers elected at large, as was the practice in some states. Again, it was a party-line vote.
After the Civil War it was Republicans who drove the issue of voting rights for Black men. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution passed Congress without a single Democratic vote. Idealism mixed with explicitly partisan motives. “We must establish the doctrine of National jurisdiction over all the States in State matters of the Franchise, or we shall finally be ruined,” explained Thaddeus Stevens, the congressman who led the Radical Republicans. The party briefly built a multiracial coalition.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/opinion-why-voting-rights-t-180128060.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
