President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act as Martin Luther King Jr. looks on. Republicans apparently dont want to protect the rights he fought for.
President Lydon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act as Martin Luther King Jr. looks on. Republicans apparently don't want to protect the rights he fought for. Senate.gov

Senate Republicans appear to be letting the Washington Voting Rights Act die, rather than pass it, for the third year in a row. THE WASHINGTON VOTING RIGHTS ACT, people.

Senator Pam Roach (R-Auburn) is perhaps the only Republican in the chamber who supports the bill, and even she is mystified as to why her colleagues won't support it.

"They somehow believe the bill will open the door to a lot of lawsuits," Roach told me today. "They say that. Or, they say believe that." The only way to pass it would be for Democrats to take over the Senate, she added.

In fact, the legislation is expressly designed to do the opposite of inviting lawsuits. The bill would create a mediation process to reform election systems in places where minorities have been marginalized out of power—which could help cities avoid costly litigation. Yakima, for instance, is fighting a costly legal battle against a 2012 lawsuit by the ACLU over the disenfranchisement of its sizable Latino population. Last year, a judge found that the city "'suffocates' the will of Latino voters."

Senator Pramila Jayapal (D-Seattle) has been trying to cajole individual Republicans into turning around on this issue, to little avail. "Continuing to block this bill," she said, "will mean more multi-million dollar lawsuits, like in Yakima, and the public—particularly our growing demographic of immigrants and people of color across the state—will know that the Republican party opposes real democracy."

Among those who've voted against the Voting Rights Act is Senator Jim Honeyford (R-Yakima), who apologized last month after talking about African-Americans and Latinos in "racist and classist" terms, and who represents a majority Latino district.

The Washington Voting Rights Act is supported by newspapers across the state: the Seattle Times, the Columbian, the Spokesman-Review, the Olympian and the Wenatchee World. No matter. "People are afraid of what this will mean for their districts," Jayapal said, "and some may simply not care about the existence of polarized voting or the ability of our rapidly changing population to elect someone who can represent them."

Roach said she's developing an alternative proposal to have small cities with polarized voting patterns automatically switch to district elections, but she sounded unsure about whether her anti-democracy colleagues would support it.