← Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Live From SXSW, With Sen. Jeff Merkley
00:11:25
Democracy reform, voting rights, and the legislation he hopes will ensure both.
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- [00:02]
A
Hi, this is Dalia Lithwick, and I'm popping up in this off week for Amicus to tell you about a conversation I had recently that I think is a really worthwhile follow on from the conversation we had last week about the big voting rights cases at the court. And as part of this year's south by Southwest Festival, which is going on right now, I got a chance to speak to Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon about voting, about big money, dark money, and about the filibust. The conversation comes as Senator Merkley and some of his colleagues in The Senate introduced S1 this week. It's known as HR1 in the House. More broadly, the for the People Act. Our Slate plus members have access to that full interview from south by Southwest. Here's just a snippet. Hi, and welcome to south by Southwest and today's urgently needed discussion with Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon on democracy reform and voting rights and the for the People act, which is a comprehensive Senate package aimed at bolstering basic ideas of one person, one vote and constitutional democracy. My name is Dalia Lithwick. I cover the courts and the Supreme Court and the law for Slate, and I host the podcast Amicus. And I'm so delighted to be in conversation today with Senator Merkley on this issue. So I think I'm just going to start by saying that we're here to try to connect two kind of attenuated ideas that despite Joe Biden's victory and inauguration, democracy has by no means triumphed over impulses of authoritarianism and that we need structural reform to bolster the kind of slightly rickety infrastructure we have now. And so I think I want to start just saying there's nobody I'd rather talk to about this issue than Senator Merkley, who's been working so phenomenally hard to try to draw attention to and kind of shine a light on these issues. Senator Merkley has served as the junior US senator from Oregon since 2009. Before that, he was the 64th speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives. He's been a leading voice in this effort to restore the foundations of democratic governance by taking on these issues we are going to discuss today. Vote suppression, dark money, gerrymandering, corruption. So, Senator Merkley, I want to welcome you to south by Southwest. It's really a treat to get to talk to you again.
- [02:40]
B
Alia, thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be with you. And this is such an important topic for the future of our country.
- [02:45]
A
So I think I want to start by just saying that these ideas are not necessarily connected. I think there has been, we have lived through four years of illiberalism, of what seems like authoritarianism, and then you and I are going to have a conversation about democracy, reform and voting rights. So of course they're connected in some sense. But I think that for people who say, hey, you know, phew, we just emerged from a four year period that saw fundamental erosions of constitutional rights and freedom. And look, the system held, everything worked and we stood in lines and we voted and so we can move on and think about other things. And I think you and I start from the opposite presumption that the system held, but barely. I think you told the Atlantic you see it as if, quote, the American vision of representative government has slid over the cliff and it's like we caught a root and we are just clinging onto it by our fingertips. So somewhere between the capitol insurrection on January 6th, Brennan center reporting showing that in the 2021, so far we've seen 253 bills to restrict voting access in 43 states, seven CPAC panels on vote fraud and stolen elections, you and I, that this is not over by any means. This is ongoing and possibly escalating. But I'm going to ask the hard question first, Senator, which is connect what we've seen in the last four years for people who don't understand why democracy reform urgently needs to happen now.
- [04:27]
B
Dalia, this is the way I would frame it that in any republic you have a tension between the very powerful, using all the instruments that they have to enact laws that favor the very powerful and against that force. You then have grassroots voices, efforts organizing, who want to use the power of the ballot box to address the fundamental needs of ordinary people. So you have the powerful against ordinary families. And I think this is symbolized by what we saw during the Trump administration, where they took their top priority to be two things. Well, two top priorities. One was tax cuts for the richest Americans, and the second was putting Federalists, members of the Federalist Society into the courts. And the federal society was formed to essentially have the courts find a version of the First Amendment that favored corporate power over ordinary people. So these two things that were the top driving force behind the Trump administration weren't about ordinary families. They were about the powerful. And why does this tension exist? Well, you think about it. When you have a concentration of wealth, that money can be used to hire lobbyists, that money can be invested in elections, that money can be used in media campaigns to change the essential understanding of an issue on how to frame issue. It can be used in teams of lawyers that contest things in the courts. And it can be used after you have control of the legislature to change the laws so that the laws continue to favor the more powerful. And there is a point that really represents that completely. It's changing the laws that make it harder for ordinary people to vote. So the voice of the powerful is threatened by the voice of the people. And if it's harder for the people to get to the ballot, it makes it easier for the wealthy and powerful to keep doing the wealthy and powerful thing, which is make themselves better off. So that is this fundamental tension and we see this right now being played out across America where state legislatures and governors, particularly in states that have Republican members or house and Senate, state house, state Senate, governor, proceeding to say, let's make it much harder for people to vote. Let's limit early voting, let's limit vote by mail, let's purge the voting rolls of those who vote only periodically. Let's force people to vote on election day, which means we can manipulate the precincts to make it harder to vote, understaff the precincts, reduce the number, reduce the number of drop boxes, put machinery in there. That doesn't work. I mean, tell people that the vote was last week so they missed the vote this week. There's so much manipulation that can go on. So this is where S1 comes in, the for the People Act. It says, hey, our job under the Constitution here in the Senate, we've taken our oaths of office to defend the constitutional vision of the participation of Americans in the direction of their government. That is government of, by and for the people. Whether your views are on the right or on the left, you get to participate. And that's the battle we're in the middle of right now.
- [07:40]
A
I love what you're saying, Senator, because I think you make this really important point, which is it's easy to look at the last four years as kind of episodic anti Democratic moments, but what you're talking about is an entire infrastructure that exists, it long exists, pre exists Trump, it will continue to exist after Donald Trump. And your point is that the capture of the courts, the dark money influence on the conversation state Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters, that's been going on for a very long time. Removing Donald Trump and putting Biden into office doesn't change any of that infrastructure. The money is continuing to pour into that. And that's one of the things you want to turn off?
- [08:28]
B
Yes, absolutely. There's Three basic forms of corrupted practices that we're addressing. One is the dark money. That is money in our campaign system. You don't know where it comes from. You can't attribute who's buying those ads, so on and so forth. And it's hidden through multiple shell operations that move the money and fro, or people who never have to disclose in the first place. Back when we had the battle over putting limits on what you and I can donate to a campaign, that was the McCain Feingold bill. So you had a progressive Feingold, you had a conservative McCain who said, hey, this money is contaminating the system, so let's put a limit on what an ordinary person can donate. Well, they put those limits in place. But what happened is the money found another way. It moved through a whole series of PACs that became dark money. And then we had a bill called the DISCLOSE act saying, hey, you got to shine a light on that. And it was so interesting because we had all these people who during McCain Feingold said, don't put a limit. The answer is instead, sunshine, public disclosure. And when we voted on disclosure, suddenly they voted against it, protecting that money. The hundreds of millions of dollars that really stemmed from 20 with Citizens United decision. So voter suppression, another big piece of this. And that's what we see in all these tactics I was just describing that are erupting in state houses across the country to make it harder, harder to vote. And then gerrymandering, which doesn't affect the Senate, but has a huge impact on state legislatures and on representation in Congress. And you hear these explicit discussions. Let's further gerrymander our state to basically reclaim control of the U.S. house Representatives. Right now, that bias. There are Democratic states that are gerrymandered, like Maryland. There are Republican states like Texas, but most political scientists say it amounts to about 15 to 20 votes currently in favor of Republicans. More bias and gerrymandering in red states. So having independent commissions set up the boundaries is a way to address this on the front end.
- [10:40]
A
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