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.”
