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In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to address discriminatory voting practices that had prevented Black Americans and other minorities from participating in the democratic process. It is considered by many to be one of the most important pieces of legislation passed in recent U.S. history.
Earlier that same year, a young civil rights activist named John Lewis helped lead a march in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery. These peaceful demonstrators were beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” That march, and Lewis’ leadership, helped bring about passage of the Voting Rights Act in Congress. Lewis went on to become a longtime member of Congress himself.
“Selma is a place where we injected something very meaningful into our democracy,” Lewis said in 2014. “We opened up the political process and made it possible for hundreds and thousands and millions of people to come in and be participants.”
Despite that progress, voting rights protections took a significant step backward in 2013, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act that required certain states with a history of voter discrimination to get pre-clearance from the federal government before making changes to their election laws. Importantly, that same ruling invited Congress to update that section.
Flash forward to today, and that is what pending legislation — the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — aims to do. The need for this voting rights update has been made clear by actions in state legislatures, fueled by former President Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, that look more like voter suppression than election security.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act has passed the House of Representatives on a party-line vote, with all Democrats supporting it and all Republicans opposing it. And it faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where all the chamber’s Democrats and at least 10 of its Republicans would need to support it to even start debate on the proposal.
So far, only one Senate Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, has said she will support advancing debate on the bill, which is slated for a procedural vote Wednesday. We hope Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins will join her.
We asked Collins’ office Tuesday if she planned to do so.
“The Democrats have been trying to turn the Voting Rights Act into a partisan issue. When this bill was last reauthorized it passed 98-0,” Collins spokesperson Annie Clark said in a statement. “The two bills presented to the Senate have been thinly veiled attempts to gain a political advantage, and are based on the flawed premise that Washington, D.C. can better run elections than our state and local governments.”
“Here is one example: if the City of Lewiston wants to relocate some of its polling places under this bill it would have to get permission either from the Department of Justice or from the Washington, D.C. District Court,” Clark continued. “That just doesn’t make sense.”
Also on Tuesday, Murkowski and others announced a deal to revise the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in an effort to secure more bipartisan agreement. She has been the lone Senate Republican supporter of the push to craft a bipartisan Voting Rights Act reauthorization. The current bill language is not the same as what Murkowski has endorsed in the past. That’s where Tuesday’s agreement, and the amendment process, could come in — if the debate gets that far.
Frankly, we think Democrats have done a disservice to the overall voting rights debate up to this point by pushing large election and democracy reform packages and pitching them as voting rights bills. The For the People Act was more than a voting rights bill, providing an easy out for Republicans and helping to chart the current voting rights debate on a course of messaging over substance, at least so far.
But this week, there’s an opportunity to change that arc. Reauthorizing and reinvigorating the Voting Rights Act cuts, unsurprisingly, to the core of protecting voting rights for all Americans. It’s a continuation of the work John Lewis and others did during the civil rights movement. The Senate, at the very least, needs to debate this bill.
In 2015, Collins joined Lewis and other national leaders in Selma for the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday. She s hared her experience, which included a march in unity over that same bridge, in a Portland Press Herald column.
“But what most amazed me about Rep. Lewis was his infinite capacity for forgiveness,” Collins wrote at the time. “Not a trace of bitterness affects his retelling of the repeated beatings and jailings he endured as he fought for equality as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.”
Our entire national debate could use a bridge to forgiveness, away from bitterness and toward mutual respect — even if that does not ultimately include agreement. That requires moving past partisan mistakes and entrenched positions. And it requires debating the hard issues, including voting rights.
Collins walked the bridge with Lewis in 2015, and she can continue that walk by voting to advance debate on the bill on Wednesday.
