Stacey Abrams Has a Plan to Protect Voting Rights

Georgia’s leading voting rights activist is working to eliminate the filibuster, which Abrams calls “a racist procedural rule.”

Republicans use the filibuster to set an impossible 60-vote threshold to prevent legislation they don’t agree with from passing. Abrams proposes tweaking the filibuster. In the same way that Democrats can pass budget bills and confirm judges and Cabinet members with a simple majority, legislation protecting voting rights should also be exempt from the 60-vote requirement, Abrams says.

In an interview with Mother Jones magazine, Abrams says, “Republicans are rolling back the clock on voting rights. The only way to head that off is to invoke the elections clause of the Constitution, which allows the Congress—and the Congress alone—to set the time, place and manner of elections at a federal level.”

“The judicial appointment exception, the Cabinet appointment exception, the budget reconciliation exception, are all grounded in this idea that these are constitutionally prescribed responsibilities that should not be thwarted by minority imposition,” she says. “And we should add to it the right to protect democracy. It is a foundational principle in our country. And it is an explicit role and responsibility accorded only to Congress in the elections clause in the Constitution.”

Abrams has also urged passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would require states with a history of discrimination to get federal approval for any changes to voting laws and procedures. The measure is needed, she says, “to make certain we don’t watch [voting rights] be butchered or eviscerated.”

“This isn’t about retribution or revenge,” Abrams says. “This is about protection of the fundamentals of our nation, that if we do not protect the participation of voters in our election system, if we do not permit states to do what they must to protect their voters, then we will find ourselves losing our democratic values, losing our democracy. And so I would say to Democrats who are hesitant that short of completely revising the filibuster, we have to make certain that a minority of people cannot be in power in the Senate, and therefore deny the basic principles of citizenship to millions of Americans.”