Blocking the Ballot in a Time of Impeachment

House Democrats on Tuesday listed the two main reasons why they want to impeach President Trump. The primary one was because he engaged in a form of voter suppression, though foreign election interference isn’t commonly understood as such. When the president leans on a less powerful counterpart, from Ukraine or elsewhere, to gin up a phony investigation of his potential 2020 opponent, he wasn’t merely doing Vladimir Putin a solid at Ukraine’s expense. Trump was attempting to rob American voters of their agency. If successful, we would not have a truly free and fair choice between him, the incumbent, and either Joe Biden or whoever the Democrats nominate.

It is a fascinating time, seeing this all unfold at the same time that Republicans in Congress prepare to block a new attempt to fix the Voting Rights Act of 1965. They appear ready to do this even as the still-unpopular Trump faces impeachment in the House for interfering in his own forthcoming election in 2020. The Republicans, apparently, feel no risk of political consequence. They have good reason not to.

With some pomp and circumstance, House Democrats celebrated the passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act on Friday. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, the former student leader who had his skull cracked 54 years ago in Selma marching for the very piece of legislation that he now aimed to repair, presided over the victorious vote. The bill, if it ever had a prayer of becoming law, would have restored over time the key VRA protections gutted by the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision. (Since then, at least 23 states have put new voter restrictions in place and every attempt at a legislative fix has gone nowhere in Congress.)

If the VRAA were to have become law, it would restore the federal preclearance that the Supreme Court struck down, recognizing its value for an America not yet rid of racism or voter suppression. Congress would have to approve anything from a voter-ID bill to a change in a polling place in a heavily nonwhite area. But I speak of these possibilities already in the past tense because despite the considerable, months-long Democratic investment in the VRAA, only one of the 197 currently elected House Republicans — Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania — voted for the bill. The Mitch McConnell-led Senate promises a defeat, and even in the unlikely scenario that the bill somehow survived, Trump has threatened to veto it.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/voting-rights-act-trump-impeachment-925091/