Partisanship Over Patriotism

By Team AOTL

Almost exactly a year ago, A.G. Holder and Stacey Abrams penned an op-ed together stating: “The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, yet over the past decade, partisanship has overtaken patriotism in the political process.”

They noted how Republicans obstructed the Voting Rights Advancement Act, despite previous bipartisan support to reauthorize the VRA. They also noted that half of the states in our nation had implemented heightened voting restrictions since 2010 — the year Republicans invested heavily in an effort to control the 2011 redistricting process and manipulate maps to secure power in state legislatures.

A.G. Holder and Stacey Abrams also rang the alarm bell on Republicans who claimed voter suppression could not exist because there was high voter turnout among voters of color in 2018. Not only did this claim offensively seek to absolve efforts to suppress the vote and ignore the herculean efforts that impacted-communities had to take to overcome the obstacles they faced, but it was also simply false. That was evidenced by textbook voter suppression tactics like overzealous voter purges and long lines at polling locations in states like Georgia. Lies like these helped the conservative misinformation campaign about the myth of widespread voter fraud hit a boiling point.

In December, we called out the 126 House Republicans who asked the Supreme Court to help them overturn election results in an attempt to put their party’s power over the will of voters. These elected officials faced zero accountability. Less than a month later, violent insurrectionists stormed the Capitol in a failed attempt to prevent the certification of those election results. Immediately after the attack, 147 representatives and senators still openly voted to object to certifying election results and doubled down on their lies about voter fraud. This is a shocking example of choosing partisanship over patriotism.

As A.G. Holder said last week, this attack was not an isolated incident, but a culmination of a sustained assault on our system of government. And he emphasized that the insurrectionists did not act alone — the elected officials who tried to overturn a free and fair election are complicit.

He also said, “There must be accountability — consequences — for their actions.”

If you agree, we invite you to sign this petition demanding that the 147 members of Congress who voted to overturn election results, after a violent insurrection besieged the Capitol, resign. Add your name here.

“We must continue to speak the truth and hold government officials accountable until every eligible voter’s voice can be heard,” concluded A.G. Holder and Stacey Abrams. A year later, their words ring even more true.

Help us hold these 147 members of Congress accountable for disrupting the peaceful transition of power and undermining democracy. We believe this accountability is an important and necessary step on the road to rebuilding a truly representative democracy.