To hear the press tell it, the failure of the Senate Democrats' S.1, dishonestly named the "For the People Act," is the death knell of democracy.

According to the Washington Post:

Senate Republicans banded together Tuesday to block a sweeping Democratic bill that would revamp the architecture of American democracy, dealing a grave blow to efforts to federally override dozens of GOP-passed state voting laws.

The test vote, which would have cleared the way to start debate on voting legislation, failed 50-50 on straight party lines — 10 votes short of the supermajority needed to advance legislation in the Senate.

It came after a succession of Democrats delivered warnings about what they said was the dire state of American democracy, accusing former president Donald Trump of undermining the country's democratic system by challenging the results of the 2020 election in a campaign that prompted his supporters in numerous state legislatures to pass laws rolling back ballot access.

Get a load of some of the headlines:

Republicans crush voting rights, making a mockery of their support for Juneteenth: Brazile —USAToday

Senate Republicans block debate on elections bill, dealing blow to Democrats' voting rights push —Washington Post

Senate Republicans block debate on elections bill, dealing blow to Democrats' voting rights push —Washington Post

Republicans Use Filibuster to Block Voting Rights Bill —New York Times

Nearly 500 State Legislators Sign Letter Pleading Congress To Pass For The People Act —NPR

Based on a Google search, I found virtually no fair or honest headlines from the mainstream press.  Besides this, President Obama was out drawing additional headlines for his support of the bill, with his pious intonations about democracy itself being at stake and other claptrap.  It was incredible.

Yet there's a reason Sens. Joe Manchin and to some extent Kyrsten Sinema, both moderate Democrats, had reservations about the S.1 bill and now the new calls to end the filibuster in the Senate.  It's that huge majorities of voters don't support it, even in this miasma of media spin.

The bill is badly misnamed, for one, calling itself the "For the People Act" when, in fact, it should be called the "For the Cheaters Act," given how many ways to Sunday election cheating can be enabled with this federal takeover of elections.

Mandates in the 900-page bill include same-day voter registration (helpful if Democrats are losing), extended voting (helpful again, if Democrats need to find out how many more votes to print up so they can win), zero voter ID (the so-called "compromise" with Joe Manchin was to allow "sworn statements," electrical bills, and student ID to vote — something that would certainly help this bunch, which registers 56 or more from an single apartment), ballot-harvesting (giving something for the unions to do to muscle voters the way they want with "we know where you live"), a crony-political voting commission with solely Democrats determining the voting rules, and other flaming garbage usually found in "democracies" like Cuba.

It was an atrocious bill, and to his credit, Mitch McConnell saw through it and marshaled Republicans to resist it.  McConnell may not like Trump, but he understands that if you don't want More Trump, then you had better ensure free and fair elections, along with voter confidence that that is what they are getting.  Otherwise, they turn to Trump.  There's no other way to send a message.

Sen. Susan Collins had the most prescient opposition to this naked power-grab by Democrats to rig elections in that she effectively argued that if elections now are as fair and fraud-free as Democrats say they were in 2020, and turnout was as high as they said it was, and they "won," why do they need this bill at all?

According to Legal Insurrection:

Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, pointed out voter participation increased to record levels in many states in the 2020 election.

"This information contradicts the underlying premise in S. 1, that we must overturn the law in every state in our nation in order to preserve the right to vote," Collins said.

Collins said the new regulations imposed under the measure would be burdensome and overturn voter integrity laws, such as the requirement to show voter identification in 35 states.

That gets to the heart of the matter.  Democrats, and Joe Biden in particular, wanted this vote more than anything to seal their legitimacy as well as their political power.  That's why it was Priority One for old Joe, with Kamala Harris appointed to be his S.1 czar.  (She performed about as well on this as she has on the border, but don't worry — she'll call her efforts a success, and Joe can fume.)

Biden seems to know that voters are uneasy with the result of the 2020 election, with all its many instances of apparent fraud — from the mysterious halts and shifts of voting direction in the dead of night from five swing states to the defiance of Democrat officials to court orders to allow GOP observers to observe the count to the witness testimonies of all kinds of voter-fraud shenanigans to the missing ballots to the dead voters to the voters registered at UPS boxes in big numbers to the more-ballots-than-voters issue in Democrat-controlled areas to the strange uncreased ballots counted all for Joe Biden alone to longstanding nests of vote fraud rings to the trucker who was ordered by Democrats to take his truck full of ballots from state to state to be counted to the Atlanta suitcases wheeled out after observers were ordered to leave.  This isn't the half of it, and one out of three Republicans at least firmly believes the last election was fraudulent, according to a recent poll.  It's probably more. 

Stopping this rigging bill puts a stop to the kinds of things that happened on Nov. 3, 2020, in the name of stopping fraud before it starts.  The failure of the Supreme Court to rule on several obvious voter fraud cases signals that the only time Republicans can stop voter fraud is before it starts, through laws that ensure election integrity. This is being accomplished by the states, as the Constitution intended, and Democrats see that activity precisely.  That's why they're screaming so unreasonably about voter ID as well as lying about the defeat of this bill as evil Republicans trying to end voter rights, although they've lately started reading the voter writing on the wall on voter ID, which is widely supported by the public.

According to Byron York, writing in the Washington Examiner:

On Monday, Monmouth University released a survey covering a number of voting proposals. Among the questions, the pollsters asked was: "In general do you support or oppose requiring voters to show a photo ID in order to vote?"

The headline is that 80 percent of those surveyed — a huge majority — favored photo ID. Just 18 percent said they opposed. That left just two percent who didn't know, which means that voter ID is an issue about which most Americans have a considered opinion.

Now look inside the numbers. Among Republicans, 91 percent supported photo ID. Among independents, 87 percent. And among Democrats, 62 percent. Democratic leaders in Washington know that a solid majority of their own voters support a measure some of them have been denouncing for years.

Looking at the results along racial lines, 77 percent of white voters supported photo ID — and 84 percent of non-white voters supported it, too. Along educational lines, 69 percent of Americans with a four-year college degree favored ID, and 85 percent of those with no degree favored it. When divided by age, 78 percent of Americans age 18 to 34 supported it, 82 percent of those 35 to 54 supported it, and 79 percent of people 55 and older supported it. And on the income scale, 81 percent of people who make less than $50,000 a year supported ID, while 82 percent of people who make between $50,000 and $100,000 supported it, and 76 percent of people who make more than $100,000 supported it.

Those are monster numbers, and a message from voters that fairness in elections is more important than who wins elections.  For Democrats, this bill has always been the opposite.  What's more, the poorest and most non-white of voters were the ones who supported it in the largest numbers.  They weren't the gullible fools with cash and degrees, who, in any case, supported it also by 3 to 1.

The Democrats should have taken a clue from the steadfast reaction seen in Georgia, when the legislators enacted their voter integrity act, and the left screamed the end of democracy and the big corporate wokesters found themselves boycotted by customers after they attempted to demonize Georgia.  That failed horribly as the Georgia legislators carried on serenely, knowing they had the voters on their side.  Now a bigger failure has taken place with this Senate rebuke of Biden and his vile power-grab, his miserable vice president notching another failure to her lipstick case.  The winners here are the voters.  They held the Legislature in Georgia and the Senate up against a barrage of lies from Democrats and their press.

Good riddance.  While the left says it is not done, and obviously, will exact some kind of pressure on Sinema and Manchin over the filibuster, one hopes they hold firm, too.  If the abuse is too great, invite them to join the Republicans.

Image: Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons (cropped), public domain.