Blocking Trumpist voter-suppression efforts

Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz have been doing a series on the Legal AF YouTube channel in which they mostly analyze current political issues but sometimes focus on historical analysis, too. It’s associated with Meidas Touch News, a left-leaning news group begun in 2020. By today’s standards of media evolution, it may already qualify as “legacy media.”

I haven’t heard an explanation of what the “AF” in the title stands for. Atrial fibrillation maybe? (Irregular heartbeat: Trump certainly is causing irregularities in the legal system.) It’s obviously often used as an safe-for-the-office abbreviation for a popular phrase for emphasis.

Blumenthal served in the Clinton Administration and was known there for promoting centrist, “third way” politics. At least in the 1990s, “third way” did at least have an aura of flexible liberalism with special attention to race and gender equity. There is still a Third Way Foundation committed to things like defending privatized health insurance and neocon foreign policies. (1) The No Labels group in the US would also fall into this general category.

But Sidney Blumenthal is also one of the best and most critical-minded analysts of rightwing ideology. His 1986 book The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power was an important analysis of Reaganism and neoconservatism. Wilentz is very good at untangling the threads of the historical development of democratic ideology and practice.

This recent discussion by the two of them focuses on tools the Democrats can use right now in the fight against Trumpism drawing on US historical experiences. (2)

The Democrats have a number of issues they can use to their benefit as long as the Chuck Schumers of the world don’t bore everybody to death with blather about “bipartisanship” instead. And if they take one or both Houses of Congress in the November elections they can do so much more visibly. Some obvious examples:

• Immigration reform, i.e., a practical and liberal immigration reform
• Limits on ICE suppression of dissent and presence at polling places
• Demand to “abolish ICE”, certainly to abolish the current set of personnel working for it
• Publicize and legislate against the Republicans’ voter-suppression strategy
• Push hard on Medicare expansion in the context of pushing back again cuts to Medicaid and demanding new controls on private health insurance
• Focus on ICE crimes and the Epstein scandal cover-up to stress the need to restore rule of law
• Tax billionaires fairly, i.e., lots more than now
• Emphasize the need for affordable housing by, for example, holding extensive hearings on private-equity funds driving up home prices by buying large amounts of residential housing as speculative investments
• Go after Trump’s airheaded tariff policies by publicizing over and over that tariffs are a tax on American consumers

The Republicans are currently using the filibuster as an excuse to not do something their partisans would like to do. That doesn’t happen very often, but it’s nice to see when it does happen. (3)

It’s almost never good to see when the Democrats use it as an excuse for their failures to deliver on important promises. They used it to kill the John L. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in 2021. The filibuster is just a Senate rule that can be changed or abolished, or set aside for an individual bill, by a majority vote in the Senate. The structure of the Senate – two Senators for each state – already gives an advantage to smaller and more conservative states. The filibuster just compounds it. The rule is almost never used to defend progressive or liberal goals. If the Republicans use it as an excuse to kill Trump’s voter-suppression measures, that will be one of the few cases it served a decent purpose.

The centrist-Democratic Center for American Progress (CAP) accurately described the filibuster’s function in 2024:

Since the end of the 19th century, the filibuster—a political procedure used in the U.S. Senate by one or more members to delay or block legislation—has emerged as a preeminent institutional tool used to deny rights and liberties to tens of millions of Black and brown Americans. Over the past two centuries, it has been abused repeatedly during some of the darkest periods of America’s history to prevent the passage of legislation that would protect the civil rights and voting rights of Black Americans, including to block anti-lynching legislation. (4)

Notes:

(1) Lacy, Akela (2019): PHRMA is Funding a Democratic Think Tanks Trying to Derail Medicare for Akk. The Intercept 04/26/2019. <https://theintercept.com/2019/04/26/medicare-for-all-democrats-phrma/> (Accessed: 2026-22-02).

(2) Trump & MAGA Face FATAL RECKONING as Nation Has Had ENOUGH. Legal AF YouTube channel 02/11/2026. <https://youtu.be/6zg1ZXGhPl8?si=8ALn1ecnkAupmCSk> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

(3) Carney, Jordain (2026): Filibuster fight comes full circle as GOP faces internal pressure on elections bill. Politico 02/10/2024. <https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/10/senate-filibuster-gop-save-act-00775393> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).

How the Racist History of the Filibuster Lives on Today. CAP 04/29/2024. <https://www.americanprogress.org/article/how-the-racist-history-of-the-filibuster-lives-on-today/> (Accessed: 2026-11-02).