(RepublicanInformer.com)- Congressional Black Caucus members are trying to pressure the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to increase efforts from the department to protect voting rights throughout the country.
The Caucus recently sent a letter to Merrick Garland, the attorney general, which said that “no lawsuit is too trivial” with regard to voting rights. In the House, 44 members signed onto the letter, which also asked the DOJ to “enforce every applicable law to ensure all citizens can vote.”
Voting rights has become a hot-button topic following the 2020 presidential election. In addition to former President Donald Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him, various Republican-led states have passed voting security laws that Democrats have claimed actually suppress voting rights of many of its constituents, namely minorities.
Democrats have been trying to pass federal voting rights reforms in Washington, but they haven’t been able to make much progress yet, since they haven’t gotten support from many members of the GOP.
So, the Congressional Black Caucus is going a different route, trying to urge the DOJ to enforce voting rights throughout the country as primaries are about to begin for the crucial midterm elections.
In the letter, the signers slammed the “unabashedly racist and partisan attacks on our nation’s democratic principles … [Such attacks]. Must be forcefully condemned and expeditiously reversed.
“We write to urge you to leverage the full might of the Department of Justice to defend the sacred right to vote for all Americans.”
The DOJ has already taken some action in this regard, filing lawsuits against the states of Texas and Georgia over new controversial voting laws the states have passed that the Biden administration says restrict access to voting.
The Congressional Black Caucus said that Black people in particular have been “disproportionately targeted for disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, voter purges and other forms of voter suppression, vote dilution and election subversion … [The] campaign to oppress Black voters is rooted in white supremacy and serves to further institutionalize the legacy of slavery.”
The DOJ’s most obvious path to securing voting access and rights, as the Congressional Black Caucus suggests, is to file similar lawsuits in federal court like the ones they’ve done in Texas and Georgia.
The federal government doesn’t have ultimate authority over state elections, which is one reason why Democrats are trying to pass new voting reforms through Congress.
Thus far, though, Republicans in Congress have blocked both the Democrat-led Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bills passed through the House, where Democrats have a slight majority, but weren’t able to overcome the 60-vote threshold in the Senate to avoid the filibuster.
Democrats have floated changing that filibuster rule just so they could push through the voting rights legislation, but the problem is that they aren’t likely to get support from two of their own to do it.
Moderate Democratic Senators Krysten Sinema from Arizona and Joe Manchin from West Virginia have both said they support the filibuster and wouldn’t support undoing it to pass voting rights reforms.
