 The voting rights of Americans are endangered. I want to tell you how we can protect them, but we must work quickly. Since the 2020 election, Republican state legislatures have worked aggressively to restrict voting rights. So far, more than a dozen states have enacted more than 30 new laws to suppress votes. In the House of Representatives, meanwhile, gerrymandering of congressional districts has allowed Republicans to hold more seats than their share of the popular vote. In 1996 and 2012, Republicans lost the national vote tally but controlled House of Representatives nonetheless. They're just a handful of votes away from doing so again in next year's midterm elections. The 2020 census will give Republicans the chance to gerrymander themselves into power for the next decade. If Republicans entrench their control despite the will of the voters, they can take over the government, including the presidency, despite being in the minority. Control of more House seats combined with the outsized power of rural Republican states in the Senate can give Republicans more victories in the electoral college, even when they lose the popular vote. Which would undermine our democracy even more? Trump alone, despite losing by three million votes in 2016, was able to install three justices to the Supreme Court. Now that's the bad news. The good news is the federal government has the power to override both voter suppression and gerrymandering with legislation setting national voting standards. One piece of legislation has already passed the House, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And a group of Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin, just introduced the Freedom to Vote Act. Both pieces of legislation face daunting odds in the Senate where Democrats have 51 votes, a one vote majority counting the vice president as tiebreaker, but needs 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster. Right now, the filibuster allows just 41 Senate Republicans, representing as few as 75 million people to block most legislation thwarting the will of as many as 270 million Americans. So as a practical matter, it comes down to voting rights or the filibuster. This should be a no brainer. There's nothing sacrosanct about the filibuster. It's not in the Constitution. It's not found in any law. It's just a Senate rule that can be changed by a simple majority. If Senate Democrats care about voting rights, they have to abolish the filibuster or at the very least carve out an exception for voting rights. Joe Manchin claims he can get 10 Republican senators on board with his compromise voting rights legislation, so he doesn't need to go after the filibuster. Well, good luck to him. If he fails, he and all Democratic senators have a duty to change the filibuster so Democrats can pass national voting rights legislation. Now, here's where you come in. Call your senators today and tell them you want them to end the filibuster and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The time to save American democracy is now.