By
On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of senators reached an agreement on proposed legislation to protect election workers from attacks and shore up some provisions in the Electoral Count Act.
The senators set out with the goal of preventing an attempted coup like we saw in January 2021, when then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to pressure his vice president, Mike Pence, to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election win.
Here’s how NBC News summarizes the two bills:
The bills seek to close loopholes in election law that then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to exploit to keep him in power despite his defeat in the 2020 election. The first bill would clarify the vice president’s role in counting Electoral College votes, raise the bar for members of Congress to object, and try to prevent fake slates of electors from interfering in the process. The second is aimed at protecting election workers.
In the coming days, you’re going to see people promoting these bills as landmark legislation. In fact, in the senators’ own announcement, they included carefully selected quotes from voting experts patting them on the back. But these bills don’t offer real election security. If anything, they protect elections from being stolen in the specific way Trump and his campaign tried to overturn the 2020 election — but the assault on legitimate elections is broader than that, and it’s continued vigorously since then.
I’m talking about the GOP’s nationwide attack on voting rights. Republican lawmakers and governors have enacted discriminatory voter suppression measures across the board, with some laws so egregious the Justice Department has filed lawsuits to stop them. Conservative senators, including many of the people who negotiated this latest package of election “fixes,” have opposed measures to stop voter suppression laws. And these laws strike at the legitimacy of our elections just as much as the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Our democracy is bleeding out. Congress doesn’t deserve credit for covering one leak while ignoring others.
Some diversity might have helped this group of senators understand that obvious point. Instead, we got an all-white group of lawmakers whose conclusion about saving our democracy fails to appreciate that the plot to stop certification of the electoral count on Jan. 6 and the plot to suppress votes at the state level are part of the same conservative effort: to discount and discredit nonwhite voters.
The foundation of Trump’s "big lie," after all, was the baseless claim that voters in districts with large numbers of nonwhite people committed fraud.
It’s a point lawyer Maya Wiley made on Wednesday’s episode of "The ReidOut," when she said we need Congress to fix the Electoral Count Act, but with provisions that "make it easier for people to vote without discrimination, because that is another piece of this story.”
Fixing the Electoral Count Act without shoring up voting access is like plugging a single opening in a bucket full of holes and thinking you’ve stopped the leak. Our democracy is bleeding out. Congress doesn’t deserve credit for covering one leak while ignoring others.
The House Jan. 6 committee will hold its eighth public hearing on Thursday at 8 p.m. ET. Get expert analysis in real-time on our live blog at msnbc.com/jan6hearings.
Related: