Don't know if this will work or not, but as Joan McCarter explained, it looks like an "incredibly smart offer from Pelosi and team, who have Boehner over a barrel."
House Democrats offer to negotiate on Confederate flag in return for Voting Rights Act update:
House Republican leadership is still struggling to find a way out of the hole they dug for themselves in last week's Confederate flag debacle, and Democrats are offering them an out. To recap, in a voice vote early in the week the House voted to ban the display and sale of the flags in National Parks as an amendment to the Interior Department spending bill. Rank-and-file Republicans were outraged when they found out, and to appease them John Boehner's leadership team slipped in another amendment reinstating the flag. As if no one would notice. Boehner ended up pulling the entire bill, and won't put another spending bill on the floor out of fear that Democrats will bring up more amendments related to the flag and embarrass Republicans further. Now Democrats are offering a compromise: the flag for the Voting Rights Act.
Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House Democrat, said Thursday that Democratic leaders will drop their push to attach flag-related amendments to appropriations bills, freeing Republicans to pursue their spending agenda, if GOP leaders will agree to consider an update to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a central part of which was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.
"I'm here to say to you that the members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the full Democratic Caucus are willing to sit down with the Speaker and work out a way for us to allow the proper display and utilization of ... the flag in certain instances if he would only sit down with us and work out an appropriate addressing of the amendments to the Voting Rights Act," Clyburn said during a press briefing in the Capitol. […]
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) alluded to the Charleston massacre Thursday, suggesting that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders need to do more to address institutional racism than attend funerals in the wake of tragedies.
"There has been an opportunity for the Republican majority not just to send a condolence card or show up at a service but to translate that into action," Pelosi said. "And we are now segueing from the conversation about the flag to a conversation about voting rights now."
