Keep fighting, no matter what, says Sen. Brian Schatz (HI)

From interview on July 19 Pod Save America

First of all, don’t despair. And the reason I say “don’t despair” is not just to be reassuring, but we have to remind ourselves that our opponents thrive on our despairing. They want us to feel despondent; they want us to feel like it can’t be done. Momentum begets momentum in the political context, and so we should turn our righteous outrage into action. 

[On voting rights legislation] the language has gotten so apocalyptic—and for very understandable reasons, because the threat is very real—that it does run the risk of having the impact that Trump did on his voters in Georgia—that if people feel that they cannot win because the system is actually rigged structurally, then they will not turn out. 

So we’ve got to keep two things sort of in tension in our own minds. One is that this is creeping authoritarianism, and you can draw a straight line from the Big Lie to January 6 and all this voter suppression. And so we have to have that sense of urgency about passing legislation at the state and the federal level; we have to have a sense of urgency about Attorney General Garland and his deputies doing everything they can to enforce the law and the Constitution. 

And I’m not suggesting that this is not as bad as it seems. I am saying, however, that if we build up to the point where the only solution is to yell at my colleagues who have basically promised not to break the filibuster and just assume that if you’re a senator from Arizona or you’re a senator from West Virginia that you can be pressured into flipping on this I think that’s just like tactically not smart, right? Because I would take them at their word they don’t want to break the filibuster. Now are there ways to modify the filibuster to make it work better? Sure. Should we keep the pressure up? Absolutely. 

Authoritarian regimes thrive on this sense of the inevitability of them winning, of a minority of people ruling the majority of people and the majority of people feeling absolutely powerless. 

And so, yes, we should fight for the statutory and constitutional provisions that protect the sacred right to vote. But no matter what happens—no matter what happens with the filibuster, with the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, with HR.1—we have to keep fighting, fighting, fighting. Because all of our predecessors—whether in in the sixties and seventies, or whether it was a civil war, or whether it was World War II—they faced these existential threats; and I very much doubt that the leaders of the movements that prevailed said, “We are well and truly f——ed.” I don’t want to present to you good news that I don’t have on voting rights in the legislative context, but I just want to say don’t despair. Because hope is a decision; hope is a muscle; and we’ve got to keep exercising it even if we’re not even sure what the pathway is forward. We know for sure that if we say, “oh, we are well and truly f——ed,” and it’s October of an odd-numbered year then we are well and truly f——ed.