Letter to Joe Manchin

                                                                                                            July 28, 2021

Senator:

I am not one of your constituents, but I hope you will still take the time to read a note from a fellow Democrat.  

First, thank you for your service to West Virginia and to the Nation.   There has to be an incredible amount of pressure to follow your state’s current governor and switch to the Republican Party.  You haven’t and I am glad that you are willing to take “the heat” of being the only statewide Democratic office holder in the state.  Your colleague, my Senator Sherrod Brown, shares that same distinction.  

I think I understand your position on the filibuster.  Not only are you a “traditionalist” in the Senate, unwilling to change that long-standing practice, but you are a political realist as well.  There may be a day when the Democrats don’t have control, maybe soon.  By opening the door to ending the filibuster, the door is open for Republicans to do the same.  It’s gaining power now, but perhaps losing critical control later.  

There’s no guarantee that Republicans wouldn’t do that anyway, but there are a lot of traditionalists in their caucus too.  So I get that.

I watched the House January 6th Committee hearing on Tuesday.  I was struck with the testimony of the policemen, who, regardless of their own political views, did their job to protect the Capitol.  They were defending the Capitol, the rule of law, and the Constitutional process of choosing the President.  They risked their lives to do so.

In part because of their efforts, the Insurrection failed in its goal of keeping Donald Trump in office.  Those officers and the action of most of our legislators stopped the direct result of the “Big Lie” campaign waged throughout the nation.  But they didn’t stop the “Big Lie”. 

It’s still out there, this “Big Lie” cause of the Insurrection.  And it’s driving the Republican legislatures throughout the country to change the voting process.  Like the REDMAP program a decade ago, this wave of election “reforms” will fulfill the Republican goal:  minimizing the votes of Democrats, particularly Democrats of color.  What wasn’t won in the halls of the Capitol building in January, they are winning in the halls of state capitols throughout the nation.

And that is not only a threat to the Democratic candidates.  It’s a threat to our Democracy writ large. We are stepping back to a time before 1965, when the right to vote was dependent on skin color.  Sure it’s being done “legally”, just as the “Jim Crow” laws were legal.  That in no way makes it right.  It’s a continuum from the Big Lie, to the Insurrection, to voter suppression.  And the only way to stop that procession is for the Federal Government to step in, just as it did in 1965. 

I also understand that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed with 77 votes.  That assured that the next Senate wouldn’t turn around and take it all back – as the Republican Senate tried again and again to do with the Affordable Care Act.  Passing voting rights today by 50 votes lays open the prospect of an “anti-voting rights” act in the next Republican Senate.  But it’s a very different era than 1965.  It’s hard to imagine, but we are even more polarized, more divided than they were over the Civil Rights movement.  There was no “insurrection” of 1965; and no one in the position of Donald Trump, “fooling some of the people, all of the time”. 

Senator, I am asking for you to find a way to protect the right to vote for all Americans.  It’s clear that there will be no Republican colleagues willing to cross the aisle in this cause, no compromise available for bipartisan support.  The compromise must be with you, and it must be over the filibuster.  Some way, a “carve out” or some other modification,  must be reached to allow our Federal Government to protect the most basic right of our democracy – the right to vote.  

Thanks for your time, and your service.

Sincerely, Martin Dahlman