Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Moderate Republicans could save voting rights by following Bob Dole's lead

Bob Dole

The late Sen. Bob Dole.

Diana Walker/Getty Images

Loeb is the author of “Soul of a Citizen” and “The Impossible Will Take a Little While.” An earlier version appeared in the Salt Lake City Tribune.

Sen. Joe Manchin’s Freedom to Vote Act, a compromise bill addressing voting rights, has been deemed dead in the wake of Manchin and fellow Democrat Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to support a filibuster exception. But it still could be saved if one or two self-described moderate Republicans stepped up.

They’d follow the path created by the late Sen. Bob Dole when he helped save the Voting Rights Act.


The bill was up for reauthorization in 1982, two years before Dole became majority leader and 14 years before he won the Republican presidential nomination. Dole had voted for the original 1965 act, which Republican leader Everett Dirksen helped shepherd through. But Dirksen was long gone by 1982, and key Reagan administration officials, including future Justices John Roberts and Clarence Thomas, opposed the bill’s renewal. Just two years earlier, Reagan had criticized the act as “humiliating to the South.”

Dole, a strong conservative who’d defended Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal, became involved through his businessman friend Leroy Tombs, a longtime Black Republican. As Tombs described, Dole was embarrassed that a voting rights bill was even needed, and he expanded the term of key sections to 25 years.

Dole’s bill included a key practical compromise, clarifying that members of a protected class didn’t have to be elected in numbers equal to their proportion of the overall population, thereby excluding quotas. Dole also clarified that those discriminated against didn’t have to prove discrimination was intentional, just that access to the vote was clearly being denied or abridged.

Once he’d drafted the compromise, Dole systematically engaged key Republicans, particularly Judiciary Committee members, to support his revised bill. He answered opponents’ arguments, persisted despite initial setbacks, and insisted that supporting African Americans’ right to vote was essential to “save the Republican Party,” to “erase the lingering image of our party as the cadre of the elite, the wealthy, the insensitive.” The Senate renewed the act, 65-8, and Reagan ended up signing it.

What if Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins or any other Republican who claims to care about democracy acknowledged how gravely new state laws threaten our democratic process? And acknowledged, as many did in 1965 and 1982, that if states are undermining democracy then the federal government must respond? It’s nice for Murkowski, for instance, to join Manchin in arguing that the Voting Rights Act must be reauthorized, that federal oversight over places with a history of discrimination must be restored, and that “inaction is not an option.” But at this point inaction is the response and the destructive state voting laws and radically undemocratic gerrymanders are on track to prevail.

Like Dole’s 1982 legislation, a voting rights bill doesn’t have to address everything. Manchin’s compromise would go a long way toward addressing the worst abuses, even if it excluded elements of the original House bill that would strengthen democracy further. But for the compromise to pass, Republicans would have to provide 10 votes, which isn’t happening. Or one or more could make it a reality by bypassing the filibuster for voting rights legislation.

Citizens are rightly furious at Manchin and Sinema for failing to provide a pathway for Manchin’s own compromise to bypass filibuster rules and become law. They’ve done nothing to check the power of legislators who knowingly disenfranchised their fellow citizens. But that doesn’t let supposedly moderate Republicans off the hook. It’s their party that is currently disenfranchising people, so if they want fair and accessible elections, they need to do more than utter platitudes.

Otherwise, we will see no check on the wave of state laws suppressing voting, enshrining the most radical partisan gerrymandering, and wresting the power to count votes away from officials who’ve upheld the law honorably. That’s not even counting anti-”Good Samaritan” bills that make it illegal to even give water to the thirsty if they happen to be in line to vote.

Imagine if just one Republican senator backed ending the filibuster in this critical situation. That might create enough pressure for Manchin or Sinema to change their position. If two Republicans did it, the bill could be passed, even if they required a few modifications. They could be heroes instead of collaborators.

Bob Dole secured those key votes in a time when many Republicans were actually willing to support enfranchising all Americans, instead of fighting to prevent their voting. Alas, most now seem to regard democracy as expendable if it might hamper their gaining power. But any Republican could still play the role that Dole once did, standing up to defend the franchise.

I believe that most Republican senators know that the 2020 results were legitimate, and that the state bills introduced since do nothing but confer partisan advantage. The question is whether they can see past short-term political gain, to truly stand up for a government elected by all eligible Americans. The Bob Dole of 1982 shows that this can be possible.

Read More

From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship
assorted notepads

From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneur John Marks developed a set of eleven working principles that have become his modus operandi and provide the basic framework for his new book, “From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship," from which a series of three articles is adapted. While Marks applied these principles in nonprofit work, he says they are also applicable to social enterprisesand to life, in general.

PART TWO

PRINCIPLE #4: KEEP SHOWING UP. It has been said that 80 percent of success in life is showing up. For social entrepreneurs, this means continuing to stay engaged without dabbling or parachuting. Like a child’s toy windup truck that moves forward until it hits an obstacle and then backs off and finds another way forward, social entrepreneurs should be persistent—and adept at finding work-arounds. They must be willing to commit for the long term. I found that this was particularly important when working with Iranians, who tend to view the world in terms of centuries and millennia.

Keep ReadingShow less
Ten Things the Future Will Say We Got Wrong About AI

A team of

Getty Images, Dragos Condrea

Ten Things the Future Will Say We Got Wrong About AI

As we look back on 1776 after this July 4th holiday, it's a good opportunity to skip forward and predict what our forebears will think of us. When our descendants assess our policies, ideas, and culture, what will they see? What errors, born of myopia, inertia, or misplaced priorities, will they lay at our feet regarding today's revolutionary technology—artificial intelligence? From their vantage point, with AI's potential and perils laid bare, their evaluation will likely determine that we got at least ten things wrong.

One glaring failure will be our delay in embracing obviously superior AI-driven technologies like autonomous vehicles (AVs). Despite the clear safety benefits—tens of thousands of lives saved annually, reduced congestion, enhanced accessibility—we allowed a patchwork of outdated regulations, public apprehension, and corporate squabbling to keep these life-saving machines largely off our roads. The future will see our hesitation as a moral and economic misstep, favoring human error over demonstrated algorithmic superiority.

Keep ReadingShow less
When Democracy’s Symbols Get Hijacked: How the Far Right Co-Opted Classical Imagery
brown concrete building under blue sky during daytime
Photo by Darryl Low on Unsplash

When Democracy’s Symbols Get Hijacked: How the Far Right Co-Opted Classical Imagery

For generations, Americans have surrounded themselves with the symbols of ancient Greece and Rome: marble columns, laurel wreaths, Roman eagles, and the fasces. These icons, carved into our government buildings and featured on our currency, were intended to embody democracy, civic virtue, and republican ideals.

But in recent years, far-right movements in the U.S. and abroad have hijacked these classical images, repackaging them into symbols of exclusion, militarism, and authoritarian nostalgia.

Keep ReadingShow less