Until the political process demonstrates that it is willing to treat voting rights as a non-negotiable precondition rather than a political consideration on par with soybean subsidies, progress is unlikely. To understand why, we need to travel back to 1890, when the Senate considered but ultimately rejected the Federal Elections Bill, also known as the Lodge bill, or the Voting Rights Act of 1890.
In the wake of the Civil War, northern Republicans’ commitment to protecting Black voting rights in the South via Reconstruction faltered and ultimately collapsed with the political compromise that resolved the tainted presidential election of 1876. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution seemingly guaranteed suffrage irrespective of race (women’s voting rights were but an afterthought in national politics in that era). Yet southern governors, state legislatures, law enforcement, and domestic terrorist organizations effectively combined to ensure the continued disenfranchisement of Black citizens.
When Democrat Grover Cleveland was elected to the White House in 1884, Radical Republicans—the most vociferous advocates of Reconstruction and the necessity of Federal enforcement of the post-Civil War amendments against recalcitrant Southern state governments—were determined to use the powers of the federal government to face down this vicious assault on the Black franchise. Cleveland, a New Yorker, was considered less polemical than Southern Democrats—but leaders of the national Democratic party still believed that they could count on him goals to disenfranchise Black voters to aid Republican electoral prospects. Under the direction of Senator William E. Chandler (R-NH), Radical Republicans began to workshop legislation to guarantee federal enforcement of the 15th Amendment. It mandates that “(the) right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”—and, as many amendments do, it noted that Congress “shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Chandler, in tandem with neo-abolitionist Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Ma.), took the latter statement at its word and got to work. When Republican Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, an advocate of federal enforcement of the post-Civil War Amendments, won the presidential election of 1888, the Republican-majority Congress pushed forward with a nascent “Voting Rights Act” that attempted to do in the Gilded Age what the federal government could not deliver until 75 years later. The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 was introduced by Northern Republicans confident that their Senate majority was about to make successful passage of that and many other bills a foregone conclusion.