VOTE TUESDAY: For the People Act
Indivisibles,
It’s Meagan again! (You’re going to get sick of me soon — let’s pass democracy reform and I’ll stop emailing you at all hours.)
Quick state of play on the For the People Act: Nine days ago, Joe Manchin wrote an op-ed that said he’d “vote against” S.1, the For the People Act. A lot of talking heads wrote that the bill was dead in the water.
You and I knew better. Organizing works. Activists in West Virginia took to the streets with a Moral March on Manchin and Light Brigades across the state and what do you know, Manchin backed down. This week, he came back to the negotiating table with a list of things he’d like to see included in the final bill.
That’s an encouraging sign, but the devil’s in the details here: we need to make sure that the For the People Act doesn’t get watered down, which means keeping in incredibly important, and incredibly popular provisions like public financing and same-day voter registration — all things that Manchin doesn’t mention in his proposal. (By the way — the current version of the bill, including those provisions, is massively popular! We don’t need to water it down, especially not to try and win over the republican minority who will never vote for it anyway.)
So that’s where we are, and here’s where you come in:
Yesterday, Chuck Schumer took the first step towards a full-Senate vote on the For The People Act, which means next week, the Senate will take their first vote on the bill, and Republicans will have their first chance to kill it with the filibuster.
Here’s the truth: We are running out of time to get this bill passed. If we don’t pass it by the end of July, election officials won’t have time to implement its provisions before the midterm elections, and we’ll go into 2022 with too much money in politics and congressional districts gerrymandered by partisans (among other things). Yikes.
The best-case-scenario here is that we manage to get this bill past the filibuster this week, as soon as Schumer brings it up. And we’d love you to call your Senators and tell them you support the bill to try and make that happen.
But (this is a big but): that’s extremely unlikely to actually happen. But that’s OK! What’s more likely is that the Republicans successfully filibuster next week, and then the Senate goes on recess without moving the bill forward. Then, when they come back in July, it’s a pell-mell rush to get the bill passed before the end of the month. That really will be our last chance to meet the Deadline for Democracy.
That means that our best chance to get S. 1 / For the People passed is to get loud — really loud — while our Senators are home during recess. And that’s where you come in. We’re going to be spending the June 28-July 10 recess fighting hard to get the For the People Act passed. After you call your senators, head over to Deadline for Democracy and sign up to host or attend an event.
We’re going to get through this together, and we’re going to win. We’ve done this before, when we saved Obamacare. When we all work together, this team can do anything.
In solidarity,
Meagan Hatcher-Mays
Director of Democracy Policy, Indivisible
