Swiping rights: Republicans’ vote-crimping bids

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Population growth and climate change are shifting the roots of the Fulani, a nomadic tribe that for centuries has herded its livestock across Nigeria. We look into how that way of life is threatened and how it's leading to increasing regional conflict. And there are still plenty of frontiers to be conquered beyond the surface of the earth. But behind the scenes, Russia and America are competing for a soft power win. Just 400km up, that's coming to a silver screen near you. First up, though.

They were prepared to cut us off and try to silence us. We were not going to let them do that.

On Sunday, Democratic lawmakers in Texas walked out of a vote on a bill that would have drastically restricted voter rights.

That's why Democrats used the last tool available to us. We denied them the quorum that they need to pass this bill and we killed that bill.

They claimed the bill targeted minorities and that they had no other way of preventing it from being passed. Republican Governor Greg Abbott responded by threatening to withhold lawmakers pay. Voting rights have become a political flashpoint in Republican states across America. Many Republicans believe, or more accurately think their constituents believe, the big lie. Former President Donald Trump's assertion that the election was stolen from him through widespread voter fraud. Yesterday, President Joe Biden said he would fight like heck against efforts to restrict vot.

This sacred right is under assault with incredible intensity like I've never seen. It's simply un American.

He put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of preventing the spread of state level restrictions. This fight may well have implications for the future of democracy in America.

Texas has one of the strictest voting laws in the country, and this bill that very nearly passed would have tightened them even further.

Idris Kowloon is the Economist's Washington correspondent.

It would have strengthened voter ID requirements for absentee ballots. It would have imposed restrictions on the ability of state officials to send those absentee ballots out to people. And it would have done things like ban drive through voting and 24 hour voting, which were new things created because of the pandemic. And it would increase the autonomy and authority of partisan poll watchers. Some of the provisions that are most controversial are the ones that don't seem to do very much to increase the integrity of the election, but do seem to have a clear intent in mind. In particular, people think of the provisions that limit early voting on Sundays to the afternoon hours. That, of course, is the time when a lot of black churchgoers tend to vote straight after the sermons. That provision in particular has caught a.

Lot of ire, and the concerns around that are what drove Democrats simply not to vote on the bill.

Yes, Democrats were virulently opposed to the bill. One lawmaker called it Jim Crow 2.0. And in protest, they didn't have the votes to stop the bill from passing and being signed into law by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott. But they did have enough people to deny a quorum, and so they walked out of the legislature and they temporarily at least paused the bill from passing. The Texas bill has been seen as among the harshest of the Republican efforts to clamp down on voting rights, and it sped through fairly quickly without very much debate, to the point where Democrats agree that walking out was their only option to prevent it. But it might be a temporary reprieve, really.

Well, what happens next then? Is there a chance for this bill to pass in the longer run?

So Texas is unusual in that it only has one session every two years, and the walkout happened right before the end of the session. In order for this bill to pass, the governor would need to call a special session in order to start the bill afresh. Governor Abbott has said that he will do this, and Abbott also signaled his displeasure by saying that he would veto the provision that funds the legislature because they weren't doing their jobs. So in my view, there's no reason to doubt that he wouldn't call a special session. And I imagine that once it's in place, these tactics can only go so far in stalling the eventual passage of this measure.

So how does all of this in Texas fit into the wider national picture on voting rights?

So for six months, Republicans @ the state level have been entirely consumed with working to restrict voting laws. States have already passed 22 such laws this year. In March, Republicans in Georgia enacted far reaching new voting laws that limit drop boxes and forbid the distribution of food and water to the voters that are waiting in line. In Iowa, they reduced the number of early voting days and the number of in person voting hours. States like Arizona and Florida have also pass rules that aim to restrict and make it harder to vote than it was.

Before. And what's the stated purpose here? Why make it harder for people to.

Vote? Well, it is because the Republican party is unable to move beyond Trumpism. And a central core tenet of Trumpism is that he could only have lost if there were massive fraud. Of course, that's not been substantiated in the many court cases that have been brought to challenge the election. Now, the measures that the Republicans in the state level are alighting on are the ones that presumably would hit Democratic voters the most and particularly minority voters. So you see that explicitly in the case of Texas with the hours that were restricted on Sundays. It's very hard to justify the selection of those hours other than an attempt to interfere with a key block of Democratic votes. There is comparatively less attention to issues that might tamp down Republican turnout. I don't think you have to be particularly cynical to think that the reason that Republicans are advocating for these voting changes is to advantage their.

Position. And what's the wider Democrat response, Ben? I mean, are we seeing a lot of pushback as in Texas with lawmakers walking.

Out? Texas is the most extreme example of Democrats just walking out in protest. And in states like Georgia, a lot of pressure has come on to big companies that are headquartered in the state like Coca Cola, to push back strenuously and delta on voting rights restrictions. And at the federal level, Democrats have proposed their own voting rights bill, what they call HR1, which would aim to supersede the ability of states to set some of their own election rules. It would guarantee a minimum of 15 days of early voting, and it would basically require that states allow people to vote even if they don't have voter ID present. It does quite a lot of other things, but it would basically set a floor for voting rights that states would not be able to.

Countermand. And what chance does that bill.

Have of passing right now? HR1, I think, has an uphill battle. It can only pass in the Senate under the current rules if 60 senators vote for it because of the filibuster, and it is not going to get 10 Republican votes that it would need in order to achieve that 60. The only way that I really see it passing is if Democrats unilaterally decide to get rid of the filibuster entirely, or at least for that specific bill. That looks unlikely because senators like Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are pretty opposed to changing that. All of which is to say that I don't think that there is going to be a federal solution that arrives imminently. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority Leader, I think, is maneuvering in the hopes that he might be able to pass HR1. But right now, the current configuration in Washington is difficult for Democrats to hope for a federal solution to some of these.

Efforts. And what's her view about the sort of the overall scope of the efforts? I mean, we hear about attempts such as gerrymandering to sort of, you know, tip the scales a bit this way and that. How much is this really kind of etching away at American.

Democracy? The most damaging thing this does to American democracy is it explicitly endorses Donald Trump's view that the election was stolen. It undermines the legitimacy of. Of elections in the view of a substantial portion of the country. In terms of what it will do to actually change voting outcomes, I think that partisan gerrymandering actually changes representation quite a lot. More than some of these attempts at changing voting rules, some of them are quite clearly targeted at suppressing the Democratic vote. I don't know whether or not those will be achieved, but in my mind, the intent of these laws is to find a formula that does eventually accomplish that. And once it is found, I imagine that it would be replicated throughout Republican states. And that's a very different theory of democracy. Rather than winning a majority of the votes to select the voters who would endorse your minoritarian agenda. And, you know, that to me is another sort of notch in a democracy that is already not doing particularly great, you may have seen that Congress couldn't even agree to pass a commission to study the attack on the Capitol. All in all, it's not looking particularly.

Great. Idris thank you very much for joining.

Us. Thanks for having.

Me. Texas is a flashpoint for all manner of divisive hot button issues beyond voting rights. This week's episode of Checks and Balance, our sister show on American democracy, looks at whether Republicans strength in the Texas legislature might help the party move on from Trumpism. Find checks and balance wherever Podcasts are openly carried without a.

Permit. For centuries, the Fulani nomads have herded cattle across West Africa, traveling along these established routes from Nigeria to.

Mali. Ore Ogunbi writes about foreign affairs for the.

Economist. The Fulani people make up around 6% of Nigeria's population, which is quite a significant minority, but they spread really far across the Sahel. They're often incorrectly grouped with the Hausa, which is Nigeria's largest ethnic group, because they have a really long history of migration into Hausa land, so much so that the Hausa and Fulani languages have become almost mutually intelligible. About a third of the Fulani people, not all of them, are nomadic herders. Unsettled grazing has become more popular since the 20th century, but many Fulani are still nomadic, moving their cattle wherever the most favorable weather conditions are. Their way of life is becoming a little bit harder. There's a growing population in Nigeria, and that's put them in increasing conflicts with the people who live along the traditional Fulani routes. And in addition, climate change has reduced the amount of water available and has diverted the Fulani herders from their northerly routes down to the agricultural heartlands towards the south of.

Nigeria. And that's where they're coming into.

Conflict. Exactly. When villagers try and turn the pastoralists away, violent altercations become quite common. So cattle rustling, which is a traditional Fulani practice, adds to that volatility. Raids and reprisals sometimes lead to villages or nomadic encampments being burned and herders or farmers killed. So in April, for instance, 83 people died in what appears to have been fighting between locals and pastoralists in three villages in Nigeria's Zamfara.

State. And is the government doing anything to try to reduce these.

Conflicts? Well, the federal government has concluded that migratory grazing is no longer viable. Instead, it wants the pastoralists to turn to settled ranching under a scheme that they've called the National Livestock Transformation Plan. The plan aims to create more than 100 ranches by 2028 and forge business relationships between the herders and the farmers. But it's not proving particularly popular. People resent the Fulani ranches being run in the southern area of the country where they aren't indigenous, even though the Fulani have been moving quite far south for centuries. And there's also some opposition from many of those states where the ranches are planned to be built and where the conflict is often most.

Dire. So can the government not impose this plan a little more.

Forcefully? Well, the problem is the federal government doesn't own the land, the states do. So the federal government has tried to encourage states to sign up by offering states funding, but a third of states haven't done so. Some of the most hesitant include several of the states that actually suffer the most from conflict between herders and farmers. And what makes this even trickier is the government is broke after responding to COVID 19. Not a single new ranch has been built in the two years since the plan was launched. As a result, the governors of Nigeria's 36 states are taking matters into their own hands. 17 of them resolved in mid May to ban all grazing on public land, or open grazing, as it's called in their.

States. Well, that being the case, it sounds as if the potential for conflict is only going to go.

Up. I mean, yeah, the problems are multiplying. Benue state, for example, where the issue is particularly acute, is known as Nigeria's food basket. And widespread conflict there could threaten food security for the whole country. The instability has also been hijacked by other troublemakers, adding to the complexity. Although violence is typically blamed on Fulani herders, it's clear that Boko Haram and perhaps other criminal groups are exploiting the upheaval. So I think what we're seeing is a traditional Fulani practice becoming a lot more complex and threatening the security of the whole.

Region. Ora, thank you very much for your.

Time. Thank you for having.

Me. The space race starting in the 1950s was really just the first of a number of space races in an era of great power competition. The Soviet program put the first satellite in orbit, then the first dog, then the first human. America capped that first leg of the race by putting men on the.

Moon. The eagle has.

Landed. The frontier for a more modern space race is Mars. And new countries are in the running, including Japan, India and the United Arab Emirates. Last month, China put its first rover on the red planet. But there's one facet of today's space based competition that harks back to that 1950s.

Rivalry. Russia and America are competing to film the first feature length movie in.

Space. Ethan Croft writes about culture for the.

Economist. Two teams have been selected, an actor and a director for both countries. And they'll be hurtling towards the International Space Station in.

October. So what do we know about these competing films so.

Far? The Russian effort is quite enigmatic. We don't know anything about the story. But there is a provisional title challenge and the American team which they're racing against is led by Tom Cruise of Impossible fame. And he's being sent to space courtesy of NASA and SpaceX, Elon Musk's private rocketry firm. The Russians made a point of announcing their launch date as October 4, which may in fact beat the Americans by a few days. But it's certain that both of them will be filming at the same time, so there's a likelihood they'll be stepping on each other's toes when they're on the.

Iss. But why go to all of this trouble? There have been plenty of films set in space. The CGI is good enough for it to be realistic. Why put the talent at risk like.

This? I suppose it's a very expensive gimmick for film producers. It's fantastic marketing. The posters for these movies will be plastered with slogans like the first film made in space. And for the space agencies, it's also great pr. And they argue that it's a good way to get young people involved in space. I mean, it's been over 50 years since the original space race in the 60s, when kids would be walking around in astronaut suits and cardboard rockets. Perhaps they want to revive that spirit again. One of the NASA administrators who's involved in the mission says he was actually inspired to become a Navy pilot when he watched Tom Cruise in Top Gun as a child. Whether the 58 year old Mr. Cruise is still the person to inspire children now, as he did in the 1980s, remains to be.

Seen. In any case, it does not sound like a cheap.

Proposition. The still untitled Cruise film is rumoured to cost around $200 million. That's not pennies, but it's not the most expensive film ever made either. Titanic, which was created back in 1997, cost around $200 million at the time, but if you adjust that for inflation, that's around $330 million today. So it's certainly not the.

First. But still though, there is some risk here.

Right? Traveling to space has become much safer since the original space race in the 1960s, but it still poses some risks. Fire, radiation, etc. The company that's making Mr. Cruise's film has had to take out space insurance, which is a Hollywood first. Both teams will be embarking on a period of intense training, including centrifuge tests, flights in zero gravity, all the things that are required before you're even able to launch into.

Space. But as you say, this is a race, and they may find themselves crammed into the ISS together. What does it say to you about Russian American relations that this isn't the kind of joint venture we've seen between the countries in space.

Before? Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency and America's NASA have had around 20 years of partnership, but that's frayed in recent years, pretty unsurprisingly considering the schism in relations between their respective governments. But there's clearly a lot to be gained in pr. Whichever team wins will no doubt lord it over the other. Whether any of the films they make will be any good is an entirely different.

Question. Ethan, thank you very much for joining.

Us. Thanks.

Jason. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes. See you back here.