Doug Hardin's Blog

The constitutional amendment America really needs

Opinion by K. Sabeel Rahman

America is in the homestretch of our fight to save what's left of our imperfect democracy. With a little over two months to a crucial election -- one that guarantees future fights between a progressive vision and ascendant authoritarianism -- we're out of time to plan for what's next. We are already living what's next. And we need to be working hard.

K. Sabeel Rahman

The Movement for Black Lives, one of the largest social movements in American history, has put the spotlight squarely on the epidemic of anti-Black police violence, and the deeper systemic violence wrought by a political system that continues to suppress the votes and voice of Black Americans in particular. Make no mistake: this is our generation's Reconstruction moment, where we must pick up the baton and continue the fight for the kind of inclusive democracy envisioned not only by civil rights icons like the late Rev. C.T. Vivian and Georgia Rep. John Lewis, but also earlier generations of unsung liberation movement activists dating back at least 150 years.

The first place to start is with major legislation aimed at remaking our democratic institutions to secure voting rights, fight voter suppression, limit partisan and racialized gerrymandering and tamp down the role of money in politics. This means a new Congress and administration should immediately pass flagship democracy reform legislation: H.R. 1, the omnibus "For the People" Act to strengthen voting rights and reform how elections operate; H.R. 4, an act restoring the full strength of the 1965 Voting Rights Act after its evisceration by the John Roberts Court in 2013; and the BREATHE Act calling for a plan to close federal prisons and immigration detention centers and reallocating funds from incarceration to social infrastructure, proposed by the Movement for Black Lives. This also means that progressive organizations and think tanks, like Demos, can and will propose robust voting rights policies for our congressional leaders to adopt.

But we know all too well the kinds of backlash that is sure to follow. GOP officials, from governors like Brian Kemp of Georgia to operatives following the ruthless example of the late gerrymandering mastermind Thomas Hofeller, will continue to develop new tactics for voter suppression and gerrymandering to gain political advantage. A federal judiciary stacked more than ever before with ideological extremists and sycophants of President Donald Trump is likely to continue to look for ways to run interference for these efforts.

These efforts are also likely to be just the latest in a long legacy of efforts to defend White supremacy and dismantle progress toward Black and brown citizenship. Black electoral power and representation hit a high water mark in the Reconstruction years after the Civil War, sparking the violent backlash of terrorism and voter suppression by the KKK and White supremacist groups in the 1870s -- which, following a series of supportive Supreme Court rulings that gutted the force of the Reconstruction Amendments banning slavery and attempting to secure civil and voting rights, ensured the rise of Jim Crow. It took the revolutionary courage of Lewis' generation to restore voting rights in the 1960s -- and even that progress was steadily undone by today's GOP.