The right to vote is a key proponent in what makes the American government work. But, for many Americans, there are barriers to the expression of that right. U.S. Congressman David Cicilline (D-RI), has just introduced the Automatic Voter Registration Act (H.R. 2694), a bill that would help to break down many of those barriers, and make it easier for citizens across the country to place their ballot.

“Our democracy was founded on the principle that every citizen has the right to participate, and make their voices heard on election day,” Cicilline said in a press conference on Monday. “The right to vote is an essential part of making government work for the people it is intended to serve, but today, the right to vote is under attack by some who want to throw up new road blocks to voter participation.”

Those who are affected the most by voter suppression activities are low income and minority households. According to a Think Progress report, young people, African Americans, and Hispanics all have lower registration rates than the rest of the population. In Rhode Island, there are roughly 249,000 eligible voters who have information records at the Department of Motor Vehicles, but are not registered to vote, according to the Office of the Secretary of State.

Watch the press conference, video courtesy of Steve Ahlquist:

Cicilline’s act follows precedents set by state legislatures, most notably Oregon, and brings it to the national level. Rather than having to opt into being registered to vote, everyone will be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 and will have a 21-day period in which they can opt out of being registered. Cicilline wants to change the current system because it makes the entry point for voting more accessible to everyone, and to make sure that more voices are heard in elections.

“It’s a significant improvement over the current system, which requires eligible voters to opt in, by registering before they’re allowed to vote. My bill reverses that presumption, and shifts the burden from the individual to the state, meaning that unless someone explicitly opts out of registering to vote, they will have the opportunity to participate on Election Day,” Cicilline said.

U.S. Congressman Jim Langevin (D-RI), Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea, and the Rhode Island chapter of the League of Women Voters Jane Koster all showed support for Cicilline’s bill. Gorbea brought the discussion down to the local level, speaking on why this bill would assist Rhode Islanders.

“As secretary of state, I am working hard to make sure all Rhode Islanders are engaged and empowered,” she said. “The way we do that is by making sure we make it easier for people to participate.”

Gorbea says the bill takes advantage of existing systems within the state, as well as technology that is readily available. Older systems and technologies, she said, keep Rhode Islanders from engaging in their civic duty far more often than it should. Gorbea is also trying to get two bills through the legislature that would provide quick and easy online voter registration as well as provide early voting opportunities, and clean up existing voter rolls.

“If we’re serious about turning our state around and creating opportunities for all Rhode Islanders, we have to ensuring that more Rhode Islanders are engaged and empowered,” she said.

“When something happens at the national level, and then you’re able to implement it, it quells the concerns of a lot of people. Why are we going to do this differently from somewhere else? We have to do this at the national level and at the local level, absolutely,” Gorbea added.

Although the demographics on the 249,000 Rhode Islanders who are eligible to vote but are not registered are not yet available, Langevin gave his own reasons as to why opting into voter registration could actually be keeping these people from actively registering.

“What I’ve found in my experience over the years, as to why people aren’t registered to vote, can fall into one of several categories. Two of the most pervasive, especially for a young person, is that one, they don’t know how to get registered to vote,” he said. “The other is that a family or an individual experienced some sort of major life change- change in job, change in neighborhood, moving to a new area, moving out of state. They come in and they’ve taken care of all the other things, and it may fall through the cracks.”

To that effect, Koster added that on average, an American moves 12 times within their lifetime, especially out of state. By making it easier to vote, states could make it easier to connect to those who are moving around often, and still give them the opportunity to participate. According to Gorbea, this would greatly reduce the “undue burden,” that is currently being thrust upon American citizens.

Gone from the list is the Violence Against Women Act, which Obama signed into law yesterday … thanks Sens. Reed and Whitehouse and Congressmen Cicilline and Langevin, for supporting it!

Here’s the newly revised list, in case you didn’t get this in your inbox last night:

1. Raising the Minimum Wage: In his State of the Union speech, the president called for the minimum wage to be raised to $9.00 an hour. And just this week, two leading progressives, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), introduced legislation to raise it to $10.00 per hour. A poll out yesterday found that 71 percent of Americans back raising the minimum wage to $9.00.
2. Universal Background Checks for Gun Purchases: The Senate Judiciary Committee is working on gun violence prevention legislation as we speak and is expected to advance a universal background check bill to the full Senate as soon as tomorrow. This is a no brainer. Not only would this be the most effective policy to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, it’s supported by nearly everyone. The most recent poll, out just today, finds that 88 percent support universal background checks — including 85 percent of gun-owning households. Other polls have shown support of over 90 percent.
3. Additional Revenues to Reduce the Deficit: A whopping 76 percent of Americans agree with the president that we need a balanced approach to reduce our deficit, one that includes both spending cuts and additional tax revenues. Just 19 percent back the Republican view that we should reduce the deficit through spending cuts alone.
4. Job-Creating Infrastructure Investments: A majority of Americans support making investments to repair and replace our deteriorating national infrastructure — investments that could create hundreds of thousands of jobs. In fact, investmenting in our roads, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure was the most popular job creation policy. Unfortunately, Congressional Republicans have repeatedly voted down such proposals in recent years, citing their unwillingness to finance them using tax hikes on the wealthy and corporate special interests like Big Oil.
5. Pathway to Earned Citizenship: A pathway to earned citizenship is an integral part of reforming our broken immigration system and bringing the 11 MILLION undocumented immigrants already here out of the shadows. Even 60 percent of Republicans support a pathway to earned citizenship, which receives the support of 70 percent of all Americans.
6. Expanding the Medicaid Program: Two-thirds of Americans favor the part of ObamaCare that calls for expanding the Medicaid program. in order to insure millions of lower-income Americans. The Supreme Court made the expansion voluntary and, thankfully, even many conservative Republican governors are coming around and now support expanding the program in their states.
7. Marriage Equality: Support for full marriage equality is now a mainstream, majority view. A study out today found that opposition to marriage equality is now concentrated “among a few narrow demographic groups.”
8. Universal Access to Birth Control: ObamaCare requires health insurers to offer birth control at no additional cost, a policy supported by 70 percent of Americans. This policy is also supported by a majority of Catholics despite continuing opposition by Catholic bishops.
9. Expanded Early Childhood Education: In his State of the Union speech, the president proposed universal pre-kindergarten for every four year-old and a significant expansion of other early childhood education programs. Unsurprisingly, two-thirds of Americans support making these kind of vital investments in our children — investments which come with significant returns.

BOTTOM LINE: Support for progressive ideas and values isn’t limited to Democrats or the left side of the political spectrum. Most progressive policies enjoy broad, bipartisan support and are simply mainstream views held by a majority of Americans. By contrast, conservatives are clinging to an ideology and views that are seen as extreme and out of touch by a majority of Americans.

How important was the Ocean State’s own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse to the national progressive agenda in 2012? Two bills he sponsored in the year that was were flagged by ThinkProgress as being among the five most important pieces of legislation blocked by Republicans.

Whitehouse’s DISCLOSE Act (which RI Future was the first news organization to report on) was named the second most important bill blocked by Republicans. It would have made SuperPACS more accountable to the American public with regard to their political advertising, so you can see why the GOP didn’t like it. Here’s what ThinkProgress had to say about it:

The DISCLOSE Act of 2012, repeatedly blocked by Congressional Republicans, would have allowed voters to know who was funding the attack ads that flooded the airways from secretive groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS.

And Whitehouse’s even more famous Buffett Rule bill came in at number three on the list. ThinkProgress wrote this about it:

Senate Republicans in April filibustered the Buffet Rule, which would have set a minimum tax on millionaires. Huge majoritiesof Americans consistently support the rule, which would raise tens of billions of dollars per year from Americans who have seen their incomes explode while their tax rates plummeted.

We give Whitehouse tons of credit for putting Republicans on record for not supporting transparency in political advertising and pandering to America’s millionaire class. Well played!!

That’s my takeaway from the Netroots Nation panel Intervention, Isolation, and the Future of Progressive Security Policy (watch the full panel in that link), which was moderated by Adam Weinstein of Mother Jones; and featured Tom Perriello (fmr. U.S. Representative for VA-5 and now president of the Center for American Progress Action Fund), Dr. Kristin Lord (here on her own behalf, but from the Center for a New American Security), Ali Gharib (of ThinkProgress), and Michael Hastings (a reporter for BuzzFeed and contributing editor for Rolling Stone whose coverage of Afghanistan forced the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal). Like the Occupy Our Homes panel, this was a last-minute decision

Mr. Weinstein opened up with a question about what a progressive foreign policy looks like if President Obama wins a second term. To which nearly all the panelists argued that the President had not pursued a foreign policy based on progressive grounds but on realist grounds. However, they mainly argued for intervention on humanitarian grounds. At which point Mr. Hastings was given a chance to speak, and said: “I didn’t know there was a progressive security policy.” He made the point that to be included in the national security conversation, you have to be either a neocon or a liberal hawk, and folks like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich see their views sidelined by establishment thinking.

There was quite a lot of talk about “humane intervention”. When do we do it, when don’t we. Mr. Gharib pointed out that the Libyan intervention, and the pursuit of such wars via air strike avoid the responsibility for post-war order. Dr. Lord thought that the Libyan intervention had turned out to be the right call, though she was opposed at the time. Mr. Hastings said that the problem with “humane intervention” is that it’s only deployed when the principles align with strategic interests; witness the reluctance with Syria versus the active response against Libya. Mr. Perriello said that ultimately a large military interest will always trump a humanitarian interest.

The problem to me with the “humane intervention” argument is that it essentially ignores the views of the American people: 76% of Americans would cut the national defense budget. It’s pretty clear that Americans are consistently tired of focusing on military intervention. And yet, even as we have claimed that our military is advancing democracy around the world, our own government has been hesitant to advance democracy through other means: the Arab Spring caught us almost completely by surprise. I can think of no statement about Tunisia. I do remember the pathetic response to crackdown on the Egyptian Revolution by Hosni Mubarak. Instead of threatening to remove military support, the United States called for cellphone and internet service to be turned back on. Instead of saying we supported democracy, we said we supported “stability.”

Progressives have been incredibly acquiescent to the whims of a president who has a kill list, has assassinated American citizens while expanding the definition of “militant” to include anyone who happens to be shot, expanded a secret drone war, and who threw more troops into Afghanistan with no real purpose. When Mr. Hastings says he wasn’t aware there was a progressive security policy, it’s not because he hasn’t looked hard enough. It’s because when you scratch the surface, there’s nothing there.