Still in thrall to Trump, the GOP has responded to its election losses by doubling down on culture war issues and allegations of election fraud. As a result, bills have been advanced in a variety of red state legislatures to make voting more difficult, at least for groups that are reliably pro-Democrat. The Democrats, for their part, have proposed to federalize election law in a manner that reflects their perceived interest in increasing turnout. Their bill is going nowhere in the Senate unless the filibuster is either eliminated altogether or modified to create a voting rights exception.
It is easily possible to exaggerate the impacts of these kinds of bills on the ground. There are recent studies which suggest that vote suppression tactics made no practical difference in the 2020 election. It is also undeniably true that the kinds of measures that are in dispute (early voting, mail ballots, etc.) were only enacted relatively recently; we managed to have elections that were viewed as fair before them. The real problem is that the margin between the GOP and the Democrats in 2020 was so small, any measure to tweak turnout can be viewed as making the difference between victory and defeat. Hence, the intensity of the dispute.
Would a voting rights exception to the filibuster be justified, based on history and logic? Could it be sustained in the long run? And how would the GOP react to it in the real world? These questions will be answered in my next post.