WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats plan to press ahead this week with an effort to push new voting rights protections through Congress, in a far from doomed effort to implement a key part of President Biden’s agenda that has been undermined by members of his own party.
The Senate on Tuesday will begin debating legislation that would combine two separate bills already passed by the House — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — and merge them into an unrelated measure. The move would allow the Senate to take the bill straight to the floor, avoiding an initial filibuster.
But that strategy would still allow Republicans to avoid a final vote, and Democrats lack the unanimous support needed in their party to change Senate rules to pass the legislation themselves. Still, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said late last week that Democrats would go ahead anyway and force Republicans to publicly declare their opposition to the bill.
“We all need to know right now where we stand in protecting voting rights,” Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “Right now it doesn’t look like it has the votes to pass, but we’re going to cancel our Martin Luther King Day recess and be there this week because we think it’s so important to the country.”
The urge to carry on, even in the face of almost certain failure, reflects the conundrum of the party, faced with two key defectors in its ranks and a wall of Republican opposition. It comes days after a critical Democrat, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, emphatically announced that she would not support under any circumstances undermining the filibuster to pass legislation, and Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia reiterated the same stance.
Mr. Kaine suggested on Sunday that there were other avenues around the filibuster, including strict amendment of the explicit to pass the voting rights bill, and extending debate time in a bid to pass the bill by a simple majority vote.
Privately, though, Democrats are less optimistic, especially after Ms. Sinema made a remarkable speech on the Senate floor on Thursday, just hours before Mr. Biden was scheduled to lobby Democrats on the bill. The speech, in which she staunchly opposed changing the filibuster, sparked a new wave of anger through Democratic ranks.
“These two Democrats have decided that it is far more important to them to protect the voting rights of the minority on the Senate floor than it is to protect the voting rights of minorities in this great country of ours, the minorities who have allowed them to the position they are in right now,” Representative James E. Clyburn, South Carolina Democrat and whip majority, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “So, I hope, but I don’t think we’ll change our minds.”
A failed vote on the legislation threatens to become the Biden administration’s second high-profile setback in about a month. In December, Mr. Manchin that he could not support the president’s sweeping social policies and climate law, as written.
But Mr Manchin and Ms Sinema’s opposition to weakening the filibuster to pass the voting rights bill has particularly vexed other Democrats, who have presented the legislation as a remedy to an existential threat to democracy caused by voting restrictions that introduced by Republicans across the country.
California speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke with the family of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“If you really, really want to honor Dr. King,” she said, “don’t dishonor him by using congressional custom as an excuse to protect our democracy.”
Understand the struggle for voting rights in the US
Why is voting rights a problem now? In 2020, as a result of the pandemic, millions of people have embraced voting in person or by mail, especially among Democrats. Spurred on by Donald Trump’s false claims about mail ballots in hopes of undoing the election, the GOP has pursued a host of new voting restrictions.
Martin Luther King III, eldest son of Dr. King, invoked his father’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, in which Dr. King described the “white moderate” as the biggest “stumbling block for black Americans in their path to freedom”.
“He was surrounded by people telling him to wait until a more opportune moment and use more pleasant methods,” Mr King said. “Fifty-nine years later, it’s the same old song and dance of Senators Manchin and Sinema.”
The Freedom to Vote Act contains a series of proposals to establish national standards for access to ballots, in an effort to stem the wave of new restrictions in states. It would require states to allow a minimum of 15 consecutive days of early voting and allow all voters to request to vote by mail; set up new automatic voter registration programs; and make Election Day a national holiday.
A second measure, named after Representative John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died in 2020, would restore parts of the landmark voting rights law that had been weakened by Supreme Court rulings. Among the provisions was a provision requiring jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain pre-approval — or “preclearance” — from the Department of Justice or federal courts in Washington before changing their voting rules.
Republicans have unanimously opposed the legislation, viewing it as an improper federal intervention in state voting and a partisan exercise designed to give Democrats an unfair advantage.