US Democrats were expected to plow ahead Tuesday with an almost certainly doomed effort to enact sweeping voting rights reforms they argue would protect democracy against threats posed by Republicans.
President Joe Biden is pressing Congress to pass two major bills broadening access to the ballot box, placing tougher conditions on states attempting to change voting laws and protecting election officials from undue influence.
The Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act passed the House last week in a package that has majority support among senators.
But neither has anywhere close to the 60 votes required to pass the 50-50 split upper chamber, with Republicans characterizing the push as a divisive federal power grab.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Thursday that members would return following the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend to take up the vote in any case.
Senators will be on the floor to debate the proposal over the next two days, at least, with a vote expected any time from Wednesday onwards.
Schumer has threatened in the near-certain event that the package fails to have a vote on changing the Senate’s filibuster rule — the 60-vote threshold required to pass most bills.
This would succeed with a simple majority but is also set to fail, after two moderate Democrats last week dealt a death blow to the idea.
Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema insisted in a speech on the Senate floor that she would not support doing away with protections for the minority party.
“I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country,” Sinema said.
West Virginia’s Joe Manchin followed suit, saying in a statement he would not “vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”
– Assault on democracy –
Republican-run states across America have spent the last year leveraging defeated former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election to introduce restrictive laws that opponents say are an assault on democracy.
A group of civil rights leaders reportedly attempted to impress upon Sinema in a video call last week that no major voting rights bill could ever win 60 votes in the deeply partisan Senate.
Sinema continues to say however that a filibuster carveout would be bad for the country, and that Republicans could use it in the future to hold a simple-majority vote to undo whatever voting legislation Democrats passed.
Democratic House Majority Whip James Clyburn, an 81-year-old veteran of the 1960s fight for civil rights, said Sunday the bills were “on life support.”
The South Carolina congressman was asked on CNN about Sinema’s prediction that Republican senators would simply turn the tables the next time they are in the majority.
“I would wish they would stop that foolishness because if we do not protect the vote with everything that we’ve got, we will not have a country to protect going forward,” Clyburn said.
With the push for broad voting rights reform on track to come up short, Democrats have the option of pursuing narrower efforts to safeguard elections.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have signalled support for eliminating ambiguities in the poorly-worded Electoral Count Act of 1887.
Trump demanded that his vice president Mike Pence use those ambiguities to block certification of the 2020 election results — which Pence ultimately refused to do.
