Splintered Democrats Stumble Toward Defeat on Voting Rights
Splintered Democrats Stumble to Verge of Defeat on Voting Rights
(Bloomberg) -- Senate Democrats edged closer to handing President Joe Biden another defeat as the chamber took up voting-rights legislation with extraordinarily long odds in the evenly divided chamber.
Republicans are expected to block a final vote on the bill, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday he would propose a one-time change to the chamber’s filibuster rules to make it harder to hold up the legislation.
But that last-gasp effort has little chance with at least two Democrats saying they won’t infringe on the minority party’s most powerful tool in the chamber.
Senator Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, has said he won’t support changing Senate rules with a simple majority vote, which will be necessary to make the change. He insisted late Tuesday that while other Democrats have come to support changing the filibuster, he won’t.
“You have a right to change your mind. I haven’t,” Manchin said. “I hope they respect that, too. I’ve never changed my mind on the filibuster.”
A loss on the voting rights legislation would shatter yet another Democratic goal and underscore the difficulty of pursuing the party’s priorities with the narrowest of congressional majorities.
“We’re under no illusion. We know this is an uphill fight,” Schumer said at a news conference Tuesday evening. He said his decision to press ahead would put every senator on the record on a bill written to expand ballot access.
But the likely doomed effort to change Senate rules to get it passed also highlights fractures among the Democrats as they head into an election year in a climate that strongly favors Republicans.
The issue could come to a head on Wednesday, the same day that Biden has scheduled a news conference. As he approaches the one-year anniversary of his presidency, Biden is faced with major challenges, including a stalled domestic agenda, inflation, a fresh coronavirus onslaught and Russia threatening war with Ukraine.
Schumer said it’s imperative to overcome Republican opposition and consider a measure aimed at countering new laws in Republican-led states that he argues are aimed at suppressing voting by Democratic-leaning residents.
He said he would propose that the filibuster rule for the voting rights bill be changed to the so-called talking filibuster. That would require opponents hold the floor with speeches to “defend their ideas,” and once their two turns to speak are exhausted, the Senate could move to a final vote with just a simple majority, Schumer said.
Under the current rules, any senator can simply object to moving forward on most legislation and 60 votes are needed to override that.
Biden last week acknowledged his drive for voting-rights legislation could be doomed after Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Manchin reaffirmed their opposition to changing filibuster rules to allow the bill to move forward with a simple majority.
After meeting privately with Senate Democrats, the president said while he hoped lawmakers would advance the measure, “the honest-to-God answer is: I don’t know if we can get this done.”
Senate Republicans say the legislation is designed to benefit the Democratic Party in elections and that the debate is taking time away from more pressing issues like rising inflation and expanding coronavirus cases. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Democrats have pushed for these changes long before GOP state legislatures passed their new laws.
“Targeting Americans’ online speech and sending government money to political campaigns is not about civil rights,” McConnell said Tuesday. “It’s about tilting the playing field, weakening widely popular voter I.D. laws and making it harder to produce accurate voters rolls. It’s not about making voting easier, it’s about making cheating easier.”
The debate will center on two Democrat-drafted voting rights measures that were combined into a single bill passed by the House last week -- an approach that allows the Senate to begin debate without a GOP filibuster but doesn’t prevent Republicans from blocking a final vote.
The legislation includes the Freedom to Vote Act, a broad bill backed by every Senate Democrat and designed to expand ballot access, and a second measure that restores the Justice Department’s ability to require some states to get pre-clearance for changes to their voting laws.
There is a nascent effort by several senators including Manchin, Sinema and Republican Susan Collins of Maine to draw up a more modest package of election law changes dealing with the Electoral Count Act and preventing interference in election administration. But it has yet to gain traction with Democratic leadership.
Stalled Senate
Senate Democrats used their slim majority to muscle a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package and a $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure deal through the chamber last year. Yet divisions within the party itself have only deepened, with efforts by some Democratic activists already under way to defeat Sinema in her 2024 primary. At the same time, senators including Budget Chair Bernie Sanders are frustrated with Manchin for forcing Democrats to further shrink Biden’s larger tax-and-spending package, the one bill Republicans can’t filibuster.
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