COLUMNS

Guest Op-Ed: Votes, not courts, will decide and defend our democracy

Richard Trumka
For The Times
Richard Trumka

You know the story. Once upon a time, before organized labor, coal companies owned entire towns. One Westmoreland County coal miner wrote in 1911, “coal barons controlled both the courts, the squires, the sheriff and the county.”

In more than 100 years of progress, we’ve learned the lessons of our history. Democracies are not guaranteed by judges or lawyers. The survival of our democratic republic depends on us. 

Millions of commonwealth voters, not nine court justices, will decide the 2020 election. 

That’s why Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled that ballots mailed by Election Day, and received up to three days after, will be counted. Asked to stop the ruling from taking effect, the U.S. Supreme Court declined. Protections for voters to cast our ballots from home makes sense during a raging, unchecked pandemic. That should be the end of it. 

But late at night on the weekend, the same folks who asked for an appeal went back to the Supreme Court and asked again. As if the Supreme Court were a Magic 8-Ball where you just keep asking the same question and, eventually, get a different answer. 

Two things changed between the first ask and the second. For one, more time passed: We’re just days from Election Day. In Allegheny County, more than a quarter-million mail-in ballots have been returned. In other words, voters have been making our plans to vote based on the Supreme Court’s decision. If the court now decides to hear the case and change the rules, it risks disenfranchising thousands. Keep in mind the 2016 election in Pennsylvania was decided by just 44,292 votes. 

The other thing that changed is the breakneck Senate confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. This was the priority. Not passing legislation to protect the safety and livelihoods of American workers and families. And now the legal argument to stop the safety precautions for voters from taking effect is deeply troubling. It represents a profound shift in how federal courts enforce voting rights. 

In short, it’s an argument that asks the court to side with political power and those who wield it — modern day corporate robber barons — over the rule of law. It’s an argument that was considered too extreme in Bush v. Gore and would require the Supreme Court to ignore its own precedents going back a century. But those now treating the Supreme Court like a Magic 8-Ball are counting on the four justices who sided with them the first time, plus one: the newly seated Justice Barrett. They’re counting on the five, together, adopting an anti-democratic point of view.  

Focusing on nine judges means counting the wrong votes. Nine people with jobs for life should not determine the outcome of this election — that decision must remain in the hands of millions of American workers. And right now, it’s still in our grasp. 

So whatever the Supreme Court does with the Pennsylvania case, voters in my home state know what we need to do. We write the next chapter in this story. We write it with overwhelming participation, right now.

Some of us need to visit VotesPa.com to locate a dropbox to return our ballot (with both of the envelopes it arrived in); others need to make a plan to vote in person between now and 8 p.m. on Election Day. 

And because of this, history will recall how the working people of Pennsylvania and the United States used our power and solidarity to decide the 2020 election, and with it, defend our democracy. 

Richard Trumka is president of the 12.5 million-member, 56-union AFL-CIO, America’s labor federation.