Thursday, September 30, 2021

On Politics: There’s a bipartisan voting rights bill. Yes, really.

The Native American Voting Rights Act is a bill that lawmakers might — might! — be able to agree on.
In Montana, Native Americans on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and in other places have faced tall barriers to voting. Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times

A bipartisan elections bill is the rarest of creatures, one many Americans have never seen in the wild.

Congressional Democrats are united behind sweeping voting rights legislation that won't pass the Senate so long as the filibuster exists, because Republicans are united against it. Republican legislators in Texas, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere have passed numerous voting restrictions over united Democratic opposition.

But on one sliver of voting issues, it seems lawmakers might — might! — be able to agree.

The Native American Voting Rights Act, or NAVRA, was introduced in the House last month by Representatives Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, and Sharice Davids, Democrat of Kansas. Senator Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

It would let tribes determine the number and location of voter registration sites, polling places and ballot drop boxes on their reservations; bar states from closing or consolidating those sites without tribal consent; require states with voter identification laws to accept tribal ID; and create a $10 million grant program for state-level task forces to examine barriers to voting access for Native Americans.

The bill — endorsed by many Native American tribes, as well as advocacy groups such as the Native American Rights Fund, the National Congress of American Indians and Four Directions — is in the earliest stages of the legislative process. It hasn't even had a committee hearing. Congress has been rather preoccupied with matters like stopping the government from shutting down or defaulting on its debt. While the broad voting rights measures are a high priority for Democrats, NAVRA is much lower on the list. And there is no telling how many Republicans besides Cole will get on board.

All of which is to say that passage, or even a vote, is far from guaranteed. It might become law, or it might go nowhere. But the mere existence of a voting rights bill with bipartisan sponsors is noteworthy. So I spoke with Cole, Davids and Luján this month about the legislation and its prospects.

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Cole said that he and Davids — the leaders of the Congressional Native American Caucus, and two of only five Indigenous members of Congress — had decided what to include in the bill, and what not to, with bipartisan support in mind. For example, as a Republican, he didn't want to touch issues like third-party ballot collection, which many Native voters rely on and Republican-led state legislatures have restricted.

But "there are clearly barriers for this population, particularly on reservations," said Cole, who is a member of the Chickasaw Nation. "I don't know that everybody will agree with what we've done, but it's an awfully honest effort to address a real problem and to do it in a way we maximize our chances of actually passing the legislation and minimize the danger of it becoming partisan."

Native Americans, especially those living on reservations, face an array of obstacles to voting. Many have to travel hours round-trip to vote, or even to register to vote, because their reservations have neither election offices nor reliable mail service. Others can't meet voter ID requirements because they don't have traditional addresses. Structural barriers have been exacerbated by legislation, especially in rural red states like Montana and North Dakota where Native Americans tend to vote Democratic.

Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, noted that under the trust responsibility doctrine — affirmed multiple times by the Supreme Court — the federal government is obligated to adhere to the treaties it signed with Native tribes when taking their land. Among other things, those treaties protect the sovereignty of tribes to govern themselves.

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Provisions like allowing tribes to set the number and location of voting facilities, and giving tribal identification equal weight to state and federal identification, are matters of sovereignty, Davids said.

"One of the things about issues that affect the federal-tribal government-to-government relationship is that we're often able to get bipartisan support because folks just recognize that specific relationship and federal trust responsibility that exists," she said. "Tribal governments should be able to exercise sovereignty over, particularly, tribal lands."

Because Democrats control if and when the bill will receive a committee vote, Cole said he believed his most important role would be in using his credibility within his party to whip Republican support for eventual floor votes.

"It's kind of hard to say that I'm not a pretty good Republican in a partisan sense," said Cole, who is a former executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee and a former chief of staff to the Republican National Committee. "So this must not be a strictly partisan bill, or I wouldn't be on it."

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He named Senators Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Todd Young of Indiana as three Republicans he believed would be open to supporting the bill, which would need 10 Republican votes to clear a filibuster in the Senate if every Democrat voted for it. (I contacted all three senators' offices on Wednesday to ask whether they were open to the bill, but none responded.)

"The urgency of this issue goes across party lines," Luján said, adding that he had had "very promising conversations" with some Republican senators, though he did not name them.

He said it was important to "capture the essence of what this bill does, which is addressing the inequities that have been created and providing the necessary resources and oversight to affirm tribes' rights to equal treatment and to assert their sovereignty in the electoral process."

While we're talking about Native American voting rights, let's also talk briefly about redistricting. As I wrote last month, Native Americans (and many other marginalized groups) have been trying to assert themselves in the process, not only for the House but also for state legislatures.

The results have been mixed.

Take North Dakota. Native Americans there want to change the "at-large" system the state uses for its legislative districts, each of which has one state senator and two state representatives for the whole district. In contrast to a system in which Senate districts are subdivided into smaller House districts, this setup dilutes the influence of groups who are clustered in a discrete portion of the district, like Native Americans on reservations. In a subdivided district, they would be able to elect a representative of their choice, but in an at-large district, non-Native voters outnumber them and choose both representatives.

They also wanted the state's redistricting committee to hold some of its public hearings on or near reservations so that Native Americans could participate even if they couldn't travel to Bismarck, the capital. That hasn't happened: All but one hearing has been in Bismarck, and the only one held elsewhere was in Fargo, which isn't near the reservations either. And advocates say tribal leaders haven't been included in the consultation process.

"We started very early with our requests, and I don't think we're going to get any of our requests honored," Nicole Montclair-Donaghy, the executive director of North Dakota Native Vote and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said in an interview last week.

They did get one thing: This week, the committee agreed to subdivide the districts containing two of North Dakota's four Native American reservations, the Fort Berthold Reservation in the western part of the state and the Turtle Mountain Reservation in the north. But the districts containing the Standing Rock and Spirit Lake reservations will not be subdivided, and those tribes may sue as a result.

One consequence of the at-large system, Montclair-Donaghy said, is that tribes are often represented by legislators who vote against issues that are supported by an overwhelming percentage of tribal members. For instance, legislators representing the Standing Rock Reservation voted for bills that targeted protesters after the demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

"I think that if we had the opportunity to run for office and get elected," Montclair-Donaghy said, "we would see a lot more representation at the county level, at the state level, to represent our people and get our issues on the radar."

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In Her Words: ‘Let’s be happy we’re aging’

Are movies and TV finally celebrating older women?
Monica Garwood

By Lisa Selin Davis

"You know what's anti-aging? Death. Let's be happy we're aging."

— Carol Walker, the character played by Angela Bassett in the film "Otherhood"

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This is the final installment of "In Her Words." Thank you, always, for reading and supporting our work.

When Kate Winslet won an Emmy this month for her performance in "Mare of Easttown," she called her character a "middle-aged, imperfect, flawed mother" who "made us all feel validated."

Ms. Winslet, 45, had something in common with the night's other winning women. There was Hannah Waddingham, 47, from "Ted Lasso," and Julianne Nicholson, 50, from "Mare of Easttown." Gillian Anderson, 53, took the Emmy for supporting actress in "The Crown." And Jean Smart, 70, won outstanding lead actress in a comedy series for "Hacks." Women over 45 were suddenly the biggest winners of the small screen.

Compare this with the 1950 noir film "Sunset Boulevard." Its protagonist, Norma Desmond, is a washed-up silent film star considered far too old to reinvent herself for the talkies.

Her age? Fifty.

Back then, and until quite recently, anything past 40 was considered ancient in Hollywood years. "It's always been this youth-obsessed industry," said Yalda T. Uhls, founder and executive director of U.C.L.A.'s Center for Scholars & Storytellers.

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Men could find roles whatever their age, but women might disappear from the screen during perimenopause, or emerge a few years later in supporting roles, usually as dowdy, eccentric or senile grandmothers, evil stepmothers or spinster aunts.

"If you were 45, or certainly 50 or over, these were the parts you could get: a dying patient or a meddling, horrible mother-in-law," said Susan J. Douglas, a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan and author of "In Our Prime: How Older Women Are Reinventing the Road Ahead."

Even if some of these so-called hagsploitation films of the 1960s, like "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" or "Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte," were good films, they portrayed older women as mentally incapacitated or murderous.

Ageism is a pervasive problem, both in Hollywood and in the United States at large. The National Poll on Healthy Aging found that 82 percent of older adults reported experiencing ageism on a regular basis, including being exposed to ageist messages and jokes suggesting older adults are unattractive or undesirable. Women experienced more ageism than men, the poll found. Yet older adults' attitudes toward aging were pretty positive: 88 percent reported feeling more comfortable with themselves as they got older.

A report from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media concluded that even now, there is a dearth of roles for older actresses, and the roles that do exist portray them as senile, homebound, feeble or frumpy. In the highest-grossing films from Germany, France, Britain and the United States in 2019, there were no female leads over 50, the report said, and just one-quarter of characters over 50 were women. Only a quarter of films passed what the report called "The Ageless Test," meaning they had one female character over 50 who was significant to the plot and was presented in "humanizing ways and not reduced to stereotypes."

But it's possible that this year's Emmy winners are a sign of changing times, changing demographics, and changing — or long-ignored — tastes. So how did we go from "frail, frumpy and forgotten," as the institute's report is called, to Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing a hilarious, diabolical and still-sexy politician in "Veep," or Sandra Oh starring as an embattled professor on "The Chair," or Angela Bassett, Felicity Huffman and Patricia Arquette starring as unappreciated mothers who take back their lives in "Otherhood"?

"We are in the midst of a demographic revolution," Dr. Douglas said. As of 2019, there were just under 72 million baby boomers and over 65 million Gen Xers. "There are more women over 50 than ever before in our society. And millions of them are not really ready or eager to be told to go away and obsess about their grandchildren without participating in and doing other things."

Amy Baer, president of Landline Pictures, which debuted earlier this year to focus on the over-50 crowd, said aging had become a much more "dynamic experience" — less about retiring than about starting something new. "They may have raised children and they're finally at a place where they can focus on themselves professionally and personally," Ms. Baer said. "They may be changing jobs. They may be finally falling in love after being professionally focused."

She says this shift — living longer, living better — is just one reason that portrayals of older women in Hollywood are finally improving, both in number and scope. Women over 45 are being cast as leads in complex roles, sometimes the best roles of their careers.

It began with a couple of outlier films in the early 2000s, Ms. Baer said. Two romantic comedies from Nancy Meyers — "Something's Gotta Give," starring Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, and "It's Complicated," with Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin — portrayed women in their 60s as romantically desirable leads. The films had enough commercial success to alert industry gatekeepers to an untapped audience. They started to realize, Dr. Uhls said, "there's a market we're not exploiting here."

That audience had both time and money, and was conditioned to going out to the movies, but could adapt to streaming. The media for and about this market appealed to other demographics, too. One of Netflix's first streaming megahits, "House of Cards," starred Robin Wright, who was 46 when the series debuted, as the frosty mastermind of the country's most powerful couple. Not long after, "Grace and Frankie," a comedy about two vibrator-designing octogenarians, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, became a hit among many different demographics; it's now Netflix's longest-running original series.

This content is "consistently successful and has crossover to a younger audience," Ms. Baer said. "There's an insatiable need for original content right now in the space that we're in."

When executives at the independent studio MRC Films approached her about Landline, Ms. Baer said she did a "back of napkin" analysis on 25 years' worth of films for and about older people and found that almost all had good returns on investment. "I'm not saying they succeed on the level of a Marvel movie, but they absolutely are financially successful," she said.

The key, Ms. Baer said, is telling the right kinds of stories, especially those that don't pander to older people. "We're creating content that is entertaining, relatable, and deals with life experiences that anyone over 50 is going through," she said, but that people under 50 can also enjoy.

Landline's first project, "Jerry and Marge Go Large," will star Annette Bening and Bryan Cranston in the true story of a retired Michigan couple who found a loophole that allowed them to win big in the Massachusetts lottery and use the winnings to help their town.

Projects like these allow female actors who once would have had dwindling work opportunities to explore new parts of their ranges. Consider Frances McDormand's Oscar-winning performance in "Nomadland," or Ms. Winslet's acclaimed role in "Mare of Easttown," both roles that required looking like non-Hollywood types.

"Great actresses are kind of enjoying being nonglamorous and not trying to look 20," Dr. Douglas said. "They're looking their age and they're proud of that and they work with it."

Suddenly women are being celebrated for embracing their age. Or as Angela Bassett's character, Carol Walker, says in "Otherhood": "You know what's anti-aging? Death. Let's be happy we're aging."

"Every actress I've had a conversation with has been incredibly embracing of our mission and really excited," Ms. Baer said. "These are all women who are still in the prime of their career and are not ready or old enough to simply play the grandmother."

This is not to say that ageism will evaporate or that face-lifts will all of a sudden become obsolete (or that there's anything wrong with playing the grandmother!). "We've got a real turnstile moment here," Dr. Douglas said. "On the one hand, there are more older celebrities and public figures who are out there embracing their age, while at the same time we still have ageist stereotypes."

The opportunities for older women are not without limitations, either. "Most of the roles are straight, white women," she said, as the Emmys painfully revealed.

We urgently need more representations of older women of color, older queer women, older working-class women, and also more stories of strong female friendship, Dr. Douglas said.

Hopefully by next year's Emmys, we'll have more.

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In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Alisha Haridasani Gupta is our gender reporter and lead writer. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes. Our photo editor is Maura Foley. Countless hands touched this newsletter over the years. Thank you for reading "In Her Words."

Write to us at inherwords@nytimes.com.

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