VT Progressive Party

The US Senate failed to even debate the most important voting rights bill since 1965! The same filibuster rule used to allow this was suspended to seat three supreme justices when Senator McConnell ran the Senate during the Trump administration. Twenty-two bills with restrictive voting provisions have been enacted since the beginning of the year. At least 61 bills with restrictive voting provisions in 18 states are moving through legislatures (31 have passed one chamber). Most, if not all of these bills have been designed to suppress the Black and Brown vote, weakening the fusion movement that made the 2020 election possible. This is a national crisis!

The elimination of the filibuster is the only way to neutralize this assault on our democracy. If these policies are allowed to stand the progress of our nation on equal access to voting will be set back generations! Further, our hopes for infrastructure updates, guns control policy, immigration reform, climate and more will be lost. Despite all of this, some senators refuse to demand publicly the elimination of the filibuster. Instead they are all preparing to come home to celebrate Independence Day. It is hypocritical for senators to return to their home states to celebrate that which was promised as being self-evident that “all men are created equal” at a time in which we return to Jim Crow!

Never in our lives have we faced such an existential threat to our democracy. We demand that the powerful senatorial duo of the brave little state publicly and urgently call for the retirement of the filibuster, NOW! We demand that the Senate majority take a stand and remain in Washington D.C. until the Jim Crow filibuster is eliminated.