Hours after Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) finished breaking former South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest speech in Senate history, Wisconsin overwhelmingly voted in favor of adding voter identification requirements to the state’s constitution on the same night its voters sent a Democrat to the state’s Supreme Court.
The Wisconsin voter identification win is so noteworthy as Booker finished his mock filibuster of more than 24 hours because state voter ID laws were the reason then-President Joe Biden and then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pushed to end the Senate’s filibuster rule in 2022.
It may seem like ancient history now, but back when Joe Manchin (I-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) were still Democratic senators, they supported the For the People Act, which banned states from implementing voter identification requirements, as part of a larger effort to federalize elections.
But as much as Manchin and Sinema said they supported the underlying bill, they were equally adamant they would not vote with other Democratic senators and then-Vice President Kamala Harris to expunge the filibuster from Senate rules.
This displeased Biden and his rabid base. In a characteristically ridiculous resort to demagoguery, Biden called Manchin and Sinema’s support for the status quo “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” He said the results of the 2022 midterm elections would be “illegitimate” if the For the People Act did not become law.
Fortunately, Manchin and Sinema rejected this garbage and voted with Republicans 48-52 to keep existing Senate rules such as the 60-vote threshold before debate can begin or end on legislation.
If Manchin and Sinema had caved to their party brethren, eliminated the filibuster, and banned voter ID laws nationwide, Wisconsin voters would not have had the opportunity on Tuesday to embed them in their state’s constitution.
Wisconsin state law has required photo ID to vote in state elections for almost a decade. During that time, voter participation has increased, not decreased, as opponents of voter ID laws claimed it would. The law is popular in the state, and Republicans sought to include it in the state constitution because Democrats, who now control the state legislature, threatened to repeal it.
Democrats often overperform in nonpresidential-year elections, which is why Susan Crawford could beat conservative Brad Schimel 55%-45% in the state Supreme Court race. But the same electorate also overwhelmingly voted to add voter ID to the state constitution by an even larger 63%-37% margin. Other polling has found that voters nationwide support voter identification by an 81%-18% margin.
When attacking the legitimacy of the Senate’s filibuster, Democrats claim it is a relic of the Jim Crow era that undemocratically thwarts the will of the majority. But as the fate of the For the People Act and its ban on voter identification laws shows, what the filibuster really does is prevent razor-thin majorities in Congress from implementing radical partisan preferences out of line with what most voters want.
Manchin and Sinema defended the filibuster in 2022, and they paid the price by being run out of the Democratic Party. Now, Wisconsin voters, a majority of whom were Democrats, have vindicated their stand.
