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Congress won't protect voting rights in must-pass legislation, but will protect Ginni Thomas [1]
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Date: 2022-12-08
One of the big must-pass bills of the end-of-year legislative rush is likely to pass in the House Thursday, and will stand as a testament to shoddy legislating and bad deals. The National Defense Authorization Act is annual legislation that specifies the budget and spending programs for the Department of Defense. Since there’s always bipartisan agreement in these programs—many in individual members’ districts—and because it’s always done at the end of the year in a huge rush, the bill becomes a magnet for add-ons.
The House expected to bring it to the floor on Wednesday, but the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) delayed it, withholding their support in the first procedural vote in a bid to try to get a critical amendment, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. CBC Chair Joyce Beatty explained in a memo to colleagues that this was the last chance to save the Voting Rights Act from the U.S. Supreme Court, pointing out that as the NDAA was ready to hit the floor, the court was hearing Moore v. Harper, the case that would throw power over all federal elections to state legislatures. Between that and the Merrill v. Milligan case, a gerrymandering case the court will decide this term, Beatty told her colleagues, “[W]e face the real potential the VRA will go from being on life support to being killed.”
The House Rules Committee and leadership figured out a procedural way to work around the CBC by using a special motion that they’ll bring up under suspension of the rules. The mechanism isn’t important—the denial of any kind of vote for voting rights is. In large part, it’s because they know including it would mean a big fight in the Senate, and they aren’t willing to play chicken there on a bloated defense bill to protect voting rights. What the Congress is willing to do in this defense bill is equally frustrating: Shield Ginni Thomas’ employment information (and that of all judicial spouses) in the name of security.
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