When the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 the vote in the U.S. Senate was 47 Democrats and 30 Republicans voting in favor, and in the U.S. House of Representatives it was 221 Democrats and 112 Republicans who voted “yea.” Even in the days when our country was roiled by racial unrest, as it was in the 1960s, bipartisanship worked.
In 2021, when a voting rights bill was passed by the House of Representatives, not one Republican voted in its favor, including our congresswoman. She did the same with her recent refusal to vote for the Violence Against Women Act, also passed by the House, because she claimed it was too partisan.
Yet Jaime Herrera Beutler promotes herself as one of the most bipartisan elected officials in Congress. Her recent vote to impeach her party’s president when he attempted the ultimate act of voter suppression by encouraging a violent mob to overrun the U.S. Capitol when Congress was preparing to certify the 2020 presidential election is viewed by some as heroic. To me, she is nothing but a weak shill for a political party that continues to support the regressive policies of the very person she voted to impeach.
