As Vladimir Putin roles over Ukraine with ice in his veins, nothing in his heart, and a dark soul of a former KGB killer, here are some quotations about war that I collected over the years that speak to the moral and real-life consequences of war.
In a democracy, people will hold different views on policy (some more moral than others), but what we have been hearing from Trump, Pompeo, Carlson, Hannity, Ingraham, and extreme right-wing alternative reality-makers in the Trump Republican Party is not only a reflection of Putin himself but a distortion of everything our better American angels call upon us to think, do, and be.
Today, tomorrow, and the next day are the beginnings of a great tragedy for the people of Ukraine and for the Russian soldiers ordered to do Putin’s bidding. No one will win in this war. Everyone will suffer the consequences of Putin’s lust for power and corruption of the human spirit.
I am not a pacifist. There are two legitimate reasons, in my view, for a country ever to go to war. The first is in self-defense from a direct attack, and the second is to stop a genocidal action against a group of people. Russia’s actions this week are clearly neither.
I applaud President Biden and the leaders of NATO and the European Union for unifying their response to this calumny, and I pray that the tough sanctions already put in place and those that are yet to come will deter and then stop this insanity before too many Ukrainians are killed and maimed.
The consequences of war — “He that is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.” -Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)
Hatred of war — “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity… Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. General and 34th President of the United States(1890-1969)
Victory in war is an illusion — “No battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” -William Faulkner, novelist (1897-1962)
Who are the warriors — “Once and for all / the idea of glorious victories / won by the glorious army / must be wiped out / Neither side is glorious / On either side / they’re just frightened men / messing their pants / and they all want the same thing / Not to lie under the earth / but to walk upon it / without crutches.” -Peter Weiss writer, artist, and filmmaker (1916-1982)
War is hell — “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.” -William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General – American Civil War (1820-1891)
War and leadership — “Any leader who does not hesitate before sending young men and woman to war, doesn’t deserve to be a leader.” -Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel (1898-1978)
A short decisive war is illusion — “The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.” -Robert Lynd, writer (1879-1949)
War and truth — “The first casualty of war is truth.” -Original author unknown
War and youth — “I hate with a murderous hatred those men who, having lived their youth, would send into war other youth, not lived, unfulfilled, to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.” -Mary Roberts Rinehart, novelist (1876-1958)
“Youth is the first victim of war – the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him.” -Boudewijn I, King of Belgium (1934-1993)
Great wars — “A great war leaves the country with three armies – an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.” -German proverb
This past fall, my son Daniel asked me about a box of cassette tapes that I recorded and sent to my mother, in place of letters, during the years 1973-1974 when I lived in Israel studying in my first year of rabbinic school at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He said he would love to read them, if I would transcribe them.
My mother kept 22 cassette tapes in a small white box tucked away in a closet in her condominium. I’d forgotten completely about them until one day my brother and I prepared to move our mother to assisted living in her 95th year some ten years ago. I brought them home and must have told Daniel about them, and he remembered.
When an adult child asks something specific of a parent, that parent ought to respond positively – I did.
So, I down-loaded a transcription App and played on my out-of-use Sony cassette tape player (I’m glad I didn’t throw it away) 19 of the tapes into my IPhone (3 tapes were damaged). I transferred the texts to my home computer and spent weeks editing what this then 23 to 24 year-old graduate student said from Ulpan Akiva in Netanya where I spent the summer of 1973 learning Hebrew, and from his dorm room at Bet HaStudent, a half-block from the President of the State of Israel’s House in the Rechavia neighborhood of Jerusalem (that dorm was converted into expensive condominiums).
As I listened to a much younger me, I was stunned by how honest and clear-thinking I was 48 years ago, how so much of what I was to become as a progressive Zionist and American Reform Rabbi was seeded in that important year in my life, and (as it turned out) in the history of the State of Israel and the United States.
Historical highlights of that year include the Watergate hearings, the outbreak of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and its aftermath, the shuttle diplomacy of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the death of the founding patriarch of the Jewish State, David Ben Gurion, the resignation of Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir and General Moshe Dayan for failure to anticipate the simultaneous attack on Israel resulting in the devastating loss of life of 2656 Israeli soldiers and the injury of another 11,656, and the Palestinian terrorist attack out of Lebanon on the northern town of Kiryat Shemona resulting in the murder of 18 Israeli women, men and children.
In addition, I came to know well my Petach Tikvah family, Devorah and Yitzhak-Tzvi Shapira (the niece and nephew of Avraham Shapira, the founding shomer of Petach Tikvah), Rav Yosef and Sarah Rozovsky (my father’s first-cousin and a Rosh Yeshiva of a religious school), and our Jerusalem family, Tamara Pinchosovich (an attorney overseeing Knesset labor and economic legislation and Avraham Shapira’s granddaughter), Morrie and Stella Bay and their children (new olim to Israel after the 1967 Six Day War), and Rachael ‘Rae’ Rivlin (known in O Jerusalem by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (publ. 1971) as the “hostess of Jerusalem” as well as the widow of Hebrew University Professor Yosef Yoel Rivlin and mother of the future President of the State of Israel, Reuven ‘Ruvi’ Rivlin.
I was friendly during my eight weeks of study at Ulpan Akiva in Netanya with Shulamit Katznelson (1919-1999), the founding director and daughter of Berl Katznelson (1887-1944), an architect of the emerging State of Israel who founded the state’s Labor Union, Health Care System, and other institutions of the State.
Finally, I established close relationships with many rabbinic school classmates. Though our paths diverged over the years, we continue to share a bond unlike any other friendships.
As I listened and transcribed these cassettes, I vaguely recall a few of the incidents and remember many not at all. Most memorable are the close relationships I shared then with the Shapira, Rozovsky, Pinchosovich, Rivlin, and Bay families, and with events before, during, and after the Yom Kippur War.
Not only did listening, transcribing, and editing these hour-long cassettes bring the events of those years vividly to mind, as if I were transported back in time, I’m reminded of the vagaries of memory, how very much we forget, how important are our early life-experiences in who we become and what we value and care most about. I also am reminded, yet again, how important it is for each of us to record our life stories for the sake of our children, grandchildren, and the generations to come not only so that there will be a written or oral record but so that they will understand themselves as the most recent links in the chain of their family’s history.
I’m grateful to my mother (z’l) for insisting that I send these tapes in lieu of writing letters, which she knew I wouldn’t do, and for holding onto them for so long thereby preserving for my memory one of the most consequential years in my young life.
I have always found it false and misleading to characterize Israel as an “Apartheid State,” as Amnesty International has done in a new report. Within Israel itself, though Palestinian Arab Israelis are second class citizens whose full rights must be addressed, they have the right to vote, the right to serve in the Knesset (one Arab Muslim Party is part of the ruling government coalition), the right to serve as judges (one of the Supreme Court Judges is a Palestinian Arab), and the right to use social services including hospitals, etc.
Life for Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, however, is different and harsh, but Israel’s military administration overseeing the occupied territories does NOT look like the former South African Apartheid regime. It is something else altogether, unjust to be sure, but NOT Apartheid. To call Israel an Apartheid state is to de-legitimize Israel’s right to exist by equating it with racism at its core. Israel remains, within the Green Line, the only democratic state in the Middle East, and to suggest otherwise belies deeper anti-Israel proclivities in the accuser. This is not to say that there is no merit in the AI report. There is. Palestinian rights to a state of their own alongside Israel is the only solution that can bring justice and peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.
J Street just released our statement of protest against AI calling Israel an “Apartheid State.” As J Street has done consistently over the years, advocates for a negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resulting in two states for two peoples living peacefully and securely side by side.
See J Street’s full statement at the link below:
“The release of Amnesty International’s new report on human rights in Israel and the territory it occupies shines another bright spotlight on the injustice of Israel’s occupation and the illegality of deepening de facto annexation of the territory it has occupied since 1967. The ongoing denial of fundamental rights and freedoms to millions of Palestinians in occupied territory runs counter to the values on which Israel was founded and undermines its security and international standing. J Street does not endorse the findings or the recommendations of the report, nor do we use the word “apartheid” to describe the situation on the ground. At the same time, we urge Israel and its friends around the world not to use issues with the report as an excuse to avoid grappling with the day-in and day-out realities of occupation and the moral and strategic catastrophe it represents for Israelis and for Palestinians.”
[Note: This is yet another reason for you all to subscribe to Haaretz, the equivalent of Israel’s New York Times. This article raises red flags, if they were not already noticed, of the danger of Tucker Carlson against American democracy, the well-being of American Jews and every minority community. Fox News is guilty of crass antisemitism as is Carlson.]
Fox News marked Holocaust Remembrance Day with a Tucker Carlson ‘Special’ glorifying Hungary’s white Christian nationalism and accusing Holocaust survivor George Soros of waging a ‘secret war’ on Western civilization. There should have been far more outrage
Thursday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the United Nations on the anniversary of the day Auschwitz was liberated in 1945. All over the world, national leaders, international institutions and media outlets commemorated those terrible years, honoring the six million Jews who perished, as well as the millions of other victims of Nazism, while advocating for education and action to prevent future genocides.
Not Fox News, though.
Instead, Fox News chose this moment to drop a new edition of “Tucker Carlson Originals” that “uncovers George Soros’ secret grip on Hungary and the media.” In preparation for its launch, Carlson spoke throughout the week about Soros’ “war” to make society “more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganized, more at war with themselves, less cohesive – in other words, it’s a program of destruction aimed at the West.”
They are, in other words, marking Holocaust Remembrance Day with a fear-mongering special about the world’s most vilified Jew – a Holocaust survivor no less – whom they accuse of using his nefarious “grip on Hungary and the media” to “wage a secret war” on Western Civilization.
And they do this as part of a celebration of the authoritarian and deeply antisemitic prime minister of Hungary, Victor Orban, specifically celebrating his war against Soros and his alleged minions: the NGOs and international media that he allegedly controls.
This is, to be blunt, a reproduction of the most foundational myths of modern antisemitism, a fundamental part of the white Christian nationalist worldview that Carlson advocates. Their mainstreaming by Carlson and Fox News, and shockingly during this week, is dangerous and warrants more attention.
Carlson has a long history of accusing Soros of a malign plan to “remake” America. He is also an outspoken advocate of the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory that posits white dominance in America is being undermined by demographic warfare orchestrated by (((globalist))) elites to “import” immigrants of color.
He is propagating precisely the antisemitic myths that sit at the heart of modern antisemitism and ultimately – when combined with the collapse of democracy – led to the Holocaust itself. It is also the antisemitic myth that led directly to the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh.
Modern antisemitism is a product of the 19th century, when ancient and medieval Christian myths about Jews (ritual murder, connections to Satan, poisoning wells) evolved with the additional element of race — the argument that Jewish “traits” were immutable and could not be changed via conversion. Ethno-nationalists began imagining the nation as an organic, racially homogenous community in which Jews might be tolerated but could never truly belong.
One of the most important features of this modern antisemitic mythology was the belief that Jews constituted a single, ontological being, organized for the purpose of destroying the world by undermining the sovereignty and strength of the national community to which they could never belong.
The powerful “international Jew” (the title of Henry Ford’s infamous tract) led a global conspiracy with claws or tentacles strangling the nation and the world. A century ago, the villain was Edmond de Rothschild, head of the most famous Jewish banking family of the 19th century and a symbol of international Jewish wealth and power for antisemites at the time. Today, it is typically George Soros, often portrayed (as in a 2021 Fox News cartoon) with imagery out of the 19th century, as a puppet master secretly controlling all levers of government, economy and foreign migration. In Carlson’s own words, this is about the “billionaire who wants to run your country.”
It is this last accusation – that international Jewry through its Rothschilds and Soroses is engaged in a war against the pure white race by facilitating mass migration of non-white immigrants – that most animates today’s antisemites.
This myth has motivated killers throughout the past two centuries, from the Russian czar inciting pogroms to the Pittsburgh massacre. Even the assailant in Texas last week imagined the existence of an all-powerful Jewish cabal, headed in his imagination by a chief rabbi rather than a billionaire like Soros.
It is precisely this classic antisemitic myth – packaged with a fascist aesthetic promoting Orban’s authoritarian regime – that Carlson presents in his video special.
The “Special” itself opens to a soaring soundtrack of Christian hymns and images of classic European architecture and white families playing happily. Then the tone shifts: violent music and scenes of darker-skinned immigrants intended to frighten.
Its first words are Victor Orban telling the camera that Europe is George Soros’ “main hunting area.” He is waging a war, we are told: “[P]olitical, financial, and demographic” – spending “billions to undermine national borders and install puppets in power,” while Hungary – an “outpost of Western civilization” – is fighting against this “evil” to preserve its “Christian” character. The Visegrad Group, a right-wing nationalist bloc including Hungary, promotes Carlson’s program
With demonic photos of Soros in the background, viewers are told that the threat posed by him is “subtle and harder to detect. This is the typical language of antisemites. Jews are cunning, we are told, puppet masters who operate in the shadows, particularly through their financial resources and control of the media, a charge Carlson and his Hungarian friends repeat often of Soros. “He attacks us with money, with media,” says Hungary’s prime minister. “Why shouldn’t we have the right to react?”
Orban’s worldview is defended by an outside “expert,” Rod Dreher, a notoriously racist “postliberal” columnist for the American Conservative who has called immigrants from Africa and the Middle East a “Barbarian invasion” and, like Carlson (and Orban), defends white Christian cultural supremacy from those who seek its “disintegration.”
Between sinister photos of Soros (bolstered by a Fox host in the video special describing him as “scary” looking) and frightening images of bloodied, dark migrants who bring “crime” and “filth and rape” – overlaid with discordant music – Carlson presents a long interlude about Hungary’s natalist policies. Here the music is sweet and beautiful with happy images of white families and children. They don’t want to import dirty migrants, they say. They want their own white, Christian grandchildren to inherit their country.
This natalism, as George Mosse among many others have taught us, is a classic fascist aesthetic. Jorg Haider’s neo-Nazi Freedom Party in Austria used such images quite freely during his rise to power in 1999, as do similar parties all over Europe. The battle between Soros and Orban is a “war between globalism and nationalism,” Carlson concludes, a classic antisemitic dog whistle for Jews. Another long-time antisemitic trope is that Jews constitute an international communist menace: Orban provides that one. “The international left will do everything they can to change our government,” he claims, but not to worry: he is ready to fight them.
True, it is not identical to a century ago. Carlson doesn’t explicitly note Soros’ Jewishness, as people did of the Rothschilds. He even spends a few seconds of the video denying that his attacks could be antisemitic, because Soros is (he claims) “an opponent of Israel.” (Soros supports Israeli organizations that promote democracy and human rights in Israel.) This is the flipside of defenders of antisemites like Orban denying their antisemitism by emphasizing their support for Israel’s rightwing politicians, not least Netanyahu.
Nevertheless, the mythology – particularly when presented in such a stark fascist aesthetic in defense of an antisemitic, authoritarian leader – is clearly the same. The antisemitic message will be received, the hatred triggered and deepened.
Tucker Carlson is a significant player. His program is the most popular cable “news” program in America, averaging over three million viewers. In fact, Fox runs seven of the ten most popular cable news programs, most of which push this demonization of Soros alongside Carlson. Very few politicians enjoy this level of influence.
The ADL helpfully condemned this program and has repeatedly called for Carlson to be fired over his promotion of white nationalism. This is welcome but more is needed. Far from firing their biggest star, Fox is promoting his antisemitic and racist hate mongering. This constitutes a serious danger, far more threatening to Jewish life than an ice cream boycott of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which somehow receives far more attention.
Fox News is due a rebrand, at least in our discourse. It should be officially recognized as an outlet of antisemitism and white, Christian nationalism – deeply interconnected ideologies being propagated on the most popular cable news show in America – and the ADL’s campaign against Carlson more robustly supported in light of the antisemitic, and racist incitement and propaganda Fox is promoting. Nothing less than Jewish safety is at stake, and the safety of others in turn.
Joshua Shanes is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston and Director of its Arnold Center for Israel Studies
The brutality being perpetrated against Palestinians and the destruction of their property in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are not representative of the Israel I know and love. Yet, tragically, this violence has become part of the story of the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian people. It is disheartening and infuriating, to say the least, and I am at a loss as to why the Israeli government and military authority allow it to continue with impunity.
What’s the evidence?
Every day there are reports that violent-extremist-Israeli-settler-terrorist-thugs (there’s no other way to characterize them – see links below) are attacking Palestinians and Jewish Israeli human rights activists in the West Bank with impunity.
Regularly we hear stories that the Israeli military authority has bull-dozed Palestinian homes it says were built without permits or are located in what are regarded as security zones.
Far too often we learn that rogue soldiers mistreat, injure, and sometimes kill innocent Palestinians.
Israel was not established to oversee a barbaric occupation such as what has occurred since the 1967 Israeli-Arab war.
This wave of violence is NOT the Jewish way, and it is unbecoming to the Jewish and democratic State of Israel that is, arguably, the greatest accomplishment of the Jewish people in 2000 years.
The Israeli government and military administration must stop all the injustices being perpetrated in its name against the Palestinian people and hold those guilty of violating Palestinian human rights to account. Yes, maintaining security is always necessary and sometimes force is unavoidable. But, unjustifiably abusing innocent Palestinians is a crime and cannot be allowed to continue. That which is allowed, essentially, is condoned and such behaviors will continue to metastasize.
Here are several pieces that show explicitly what is now happening far too regularly in the occupied territories:
I’ve been thinking of late, given the deadly persistence and spread of Covid and its “Greek” variants, our shuttering in place (again!), the political and violent threat of Trump Republicans against American democracy, the rise in violent antisemitism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia, an ever-worsening climate crisis, and a crumbling of communal ties in a toxic and polarized America.
Over the past eleven plus years, as a means of keeping my sanity, gaining perspective over events large and small, expanding my reach beyond my own community to help educate, provoke, and (at times) inspire, I’ve been writing this blog without let-up.
As a kind of personal mini-Yom Kippur, I thought it worthwhile now for me to take a step back and assess the state of this blog relative to my initial goals. Are they what they once were and are they relevant still?
Eleven plus years ago I had four goals:
To bring to light what I considered issues of importance facing the American Jewish community, Israel, and the United States from the perspective of liberal American values, liberal Jewish values, and progressive Reform Zionism;
To reflect on Judaism as a fertile font from which our liberal Jewish identity as ethical and spiritual beings can be clarified, nurtured, and enhanced;
To glean general take-away lessons on a wide variety of large and small life events and challenges;
To offer quotations that enlighten, give food for thought, provoke, and focus our thinking and activism on behalf of the common good.
I’ve been grateful for the opportunity to think out-load on this platform, to discipline my thinking to what I believe is essential to any particular argument, event, or matter, and to advance a point of view that’s positive, life-affirming, and consistent with core liberal American and progressive Jewish values.
My son, Daniel, urged me at the beginning to avoid writing anything longer than 800 words because most people ‘s attention span is short. I’ve tried to do that.
There’s a Jewish tradition of citing sources called “l’shem omro – in the name of…”, and I’ve done this too. Not only is it ethically right to give credit to others, but doing it nurtures the virtues of humility, generosity, and gratitude that are, I believe, among the predicates for attaining well-being in one’s life.
I’ve used many blogs, perhaps too many for some readers, to discuss progressive Reform Zionism and the State of Israel. I’ve done so because Israel and Jewish peoplehood are in my DNA, and because I believe that to be a Jew in the 21st century means struggling to understand our relationship with the modern State of Israel, arguably the greatest accomplishment of the Jewish people in two thousand years.
For forty years, I served as a congregational rabbi, and my central task was to live a life that I believed was worthy of the highest values and virtues in liberal Judaism. These blogs helped me think through issues that confronted me, my colleagues, my lay-leadership, and my fellow Jews and Zionists over the years. For that, for them, and for the tradition out of which we come, I’m grateful.
Have I held to the four larger original goals? I think I have – but I’ll let you who follow what I write decide for yourselves. Thank you for reading.
I do not know Rabbi Charlie Citron-Walker of Colleyville, Texas personally, but I love and respect the man. His ordeal against this most recent antisemitic attack, it seems to me, ended as it did without physical harm coming to him and the other hostages as a consequence of his empathy and capacity to relate lovingly with people, his studied calm in facing danger, and his instinct for taking advantage of a single moment to escape after he and his fellow hostages concluded that their survival was ultimately on them alone to act when the moment presented itself.
The outpouring of loving support to Charlie and his fellow hostages from the Colleyville religious community of Christians and Muslims, the American Reform movement and Jewish people around the world, and all decent Americans, was as a consequence, in the first case, of Charlie’s years of work befriending and finding common ground with his fellow clergy colleagues from across religious lines in Colleyville, and then from the close organizational and communal support system developed over the past century in the American Reform Jewish movement, and from the Jewish people’s millennial tradition of feeling responsible for and acting in support of one another.
None of these consequences is automatic. Creating community on both the small and large scale takes deliberate and consistent effort at every level of community organization, in every endeavor, by individuals and small groups, by leaders and those behind the scenes who are the connective tissue of relationships and the builders of community.
Rabbi Charlie showed the world this past weekend what he is made of as a Jewish leader, and in that he taught us all about how to be fully present in the moment, to stay true to himself as a rabbinic trailblazer, and to confront an adversary with courage, strength, grace, dignity, intelligence, and common human decency. Rabbi Charlie became a model of leadership for many far beyond his community that already knows and loves him. He is an inspiration, and if there is any silver lining to be found here, it is this – that Rabbi Charlie Citron-Walker set the very best human face of the Jewish people before the world.
When the hostages escaped, all who value human life breathed a sigh of relief. I pray that Rabbi Charlie and his family, the other hostages and their families, and his Colleyville community will find healing and added strength of purpose in the wake of this ordeal.
Dr. Martin Luther King spoke from the bimah of Temple Israel of Hollywood in Los Angeles on Shabbat evening, February 26, 1965, only five days after the assassination of Malcolm X.
Security was tight around the synagogue on that evening. Sharpshooters were placed on the apartment building across the street on Hollywood Boulevard. Dr. King delivered his sermon with two large body guards standing directly behind him.
The Sanctuary was filled to capacity with 1400+ congregants. Rabbi Max Nussbaum reminded the congregation that since it was Shabbat, applause following Dr. King’s remarks would be inappropriate. He said: “You will wish to applaud, and you will not do so!”
This existence of the recorded speech was discovered by the wider Los Angeles Jewish community and was noted in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal before Martin Luther King Day in 2007. National Public Radio learned of it from the LAJJ article and requested permission to air it nationally that year. It was aired both in 2007 and 2008.
The speech borrows from many other addresses Dr. King delivered over the course of his career and is an example of the eloquence, passion, and deep intellect that was Dr. King. He was 35 years old when he delivered it.
[Note: What follows is today’s (January 13) daily newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson, an American historian and professor of history at Boston College. I read it daily for details on whatever is happening nationally. It is excellent and I highly recommend it. Google her newsletter and subscribe if you find what you read here today worthwhile.]
“The struggle between the Trump-backed forces of authoritarianism and those of us defending democracy is coming down to the fight over whether the Democrats can get the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act through the Senate.
It’s worth reading what’s actually in the bills because, to my mind, it is bananas that they are in any way controversial.
The Freedom to Vote Act is a trimmed version of the For the People Act the House passed at the beginning of this congressional session. It establishes a baseline for access to the ballot across all states. That baseline includes at least two weeks of early voting for any town of more than 3000 people, including on nights and weekends, for at least 10 hours a day. It permits people to vote by mail, or to drop their ballots into either a polling place or a drop box, and guarantees those votes will be counted so long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive at the polling place within a week. It makes Election Day a holiday. It provides uniform standards for voter IDs in states that require them.
The Freedom to Vote Act cracks down on voter suppression. It makes it a federal crime to lie to voters in order to deter them from voting (distributing official-looking flyers with the wrong dates for an election or locations of a polling place, for example), and it increases the penalties for voter intimidation. It restores federal voting rights for people who have served time in jail, creating a uniform system out of the current patchwork one.
It requires states to guarantee that no one has to wait more than 30 minutes to vote.
Using measures already in place in a number of states, the Freedom to Vote Act provides uniform voter registration rules. It establishes automatic voter registration at state Departments of Motor Vehicles, permits same-day voter registration, allows online voter registration, and protects voters from the purges that have plagued voting registrations for decades now, requiring that voters be notified if they are dropped from the rolls and given information on how to get back on them.
The Freedom to Vote Act bans partisan gerrymandering.
The Freedom to Vote Act requires any entity that spends more than $10,000 in an election to disclose all its major donors, thus cleaning up dark money in politics. It requires all advertisements to identify who is paying for them. It makes it harder for political action committees (PACs) to coordinate with candidates, and it beefs up the power of the Federal Election Commission that ensures candidates run their campaigns legally.
The Freedom to Vote Act also addresses the laws Republican-dominated states have passed in the last year to guarantee that Republicans win future elections. It protects local election officers from intimidation and firing for partisan purposes. It expands penalties for tampering with ballots after an election (as happened in Maricopa County, Arizona, where the Cyber Ninjas investigating the results did not use standard protection for them and have been unable to produce documents for a freedom of information lawsuit, leading to fines of $50,000 a day and the company’s dissolution). If someone does tamper with the results or refuses to certify them, voters can sue.
The act also prevents attempts to overturn elections by requiring audits after elections, making sure those audits have clearly defined rules and procedures. And it prohibits voting machines that don’t leave a paper record.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (VRAA) takes on issues of discrimination in voting by updating and restoring the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013 and 2021. The VRA required that states with a history of discrimination in voting get the Department of Justice to approve any changes they wanted to make in their voting laws before they went into effect, and in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court struck that requirement down, in part because the justices felt the formula in the law was outdated.
The VRAA provides a new, modern formula for determining which states need preapproval, based on how many voting rights violations they’ve had in the past 25 years. After ten years without violations, they will no longer need preclearance. It also establishes some practices that must always be cleared, such as getting rid of ballots printed in different languages (as required in the U.S. since 1975).
The VRAA also restores the ability of voters to sue if their rights are violated, something the 2021 Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision makes difficult.
The VRAA directly addresses the ability of Indigenous Americans, who face unique voting problems, to vote. It requires at least one polling place on tribal lands, for example, and requires states to accept tribal or federal IDs.
That’s it.
It is off-the-charts astonishing that no Republicans are willing to entertain these common-sense measures, especially since there are in the Senate a number of Republicans who voted in 2006 to reauthorize the 1965 Voting Rights Act the VRAA is designed to restore.
McConnell today revealed his discomfort with President Joe Biden’s speech yesterday at the Atlanta University Center Consortium, when Biden pointed out that “[h]istory has never been kind to those who have sided with voter suppression over voters’ rights. And it will be even less kind for those who side with election subversion.” Biden asked Republican senators to choose between our history’s advocates of voting rights and those who opposed such rights. He asked:
“Do you want to be…on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
Today, McConnell, who never complained about the intemperate speeches of former president Donald Trump, said Biden’s speech revealed him to be “profoundly, profoundly unpresidential.”
The voting rights measures appear to have the support of the Senate Democrats, but because of the Senate filibuster, which makes it possible for senators to block any measure unless a supermajority of 60 senators are willing to vote for it, voting rights cannot pass unless Democrats are willing to figure out a way to bypass the filibuster. Two Democratic senators—Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV)—are currently unwilling to do that.
Nine Democratic senators eager to pass this measure met with Sinema for two and a half hours last night and for another hour with Manchin this morning in an attempt to get them to a place where they are willing to change the rules of the Senate filibuster to protect our right to vote.
They have not yet found a solution.
This evening, Senate Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that he would bring voting rights legislation to the Senate floor for debate—which Republicans have rejected—by avoiding a Republican filibuster through a complicated workaround. When the House and Senate disagree on a bill (which is almost always), they send it back and forth with revisions until they reach a final version. According to Democracy Docket, after it has gone back and forth three times, a motion to proceed on it cannot be filibustered. So, Democrats in the House are going to take a bill that has already hit the three-trip mark and substitute for that bill the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. They’ll pass the combined bill and send it to the Senate, where debate over it can’t be filibustered.
And so, Republican senators will have to explain to the people why they oppose what appear to be common-sense voting rules.”
I’m fairly certain that anyone reading what I write is already persuaded by what Max Boot argued in the Washington Post last October. If you have friends who continue to support the Republican Party because that is what they have always done and because they are legitimate political conservatives (like Liz Cheney), share what I post below from Boot’s telling op-ed:
“I’m no Democrat—but I’m voting exclusively for Democrats to save our democracy.I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats—as I have done in every election since 2016—until the GOP ceases to pose an existential threat to our freedom…. It is mind-boggling that a defeated president won’t accept the election outcome…. What is even more alarming is that more than 60 percent of Republicans agree with his preposterous assertion that the election was stolen and want him to remain as the party’s leader. ”
-Max Boot, Washington Post, October 11, 2021 – Boot is a Russian-American specialist in foreign affairs who identifies as a conservative but no longer supports the Republican Party.
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