John Blake: ‘Democrats are on the verge of repeating a voting-rights blunder that led to the rise of Jim Crow’

From CNN:

 

As I watch some Democrats handle the voting rights issue, I’m seeing a replay of a 19th-century political horror story. It ended with Black voters losing faith in the leaders who were supposed to protect them.

 

President Biden has called voting rights “the single most important” issue and described a wave of voter restriction bills recently passed by Republican legislatures across the US as “Jim Crow on steroids.”

 

Yet he has refused to throw the full weight of the Oval Office behind passing two pending voting rights bills in Congress. He has stopped short of embracing calls to jettison the filibuster — the parliamentary tactic Republicans can use to halt a voting-rights bill — because he says it would “throw the entire Congress into chaos.”

He’s focused instead on passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that could rejuvenate the economy and appeal to a broad swath of voters.

 

But for anyone who knows this country’s shameful voting-rights history, Biden is following a script that once doomed Black voters and made the rise of Jim Crow possible.

 

 

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