WASHINGTON — Lacking the votes to change filibuster rules, Senate Democrats are pushing ahead with a new strategy on their sweeping voting and elections legislation: launching debate short of assurance of a vote in order to force a public showdown over the key party priority.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer outlined the plan in a memo obtained Wednesday by the Associated Press, on the eve of President Biden’s visit to meet privately with Senate Democrats about the path forward. It still leaves the Democrats in need of a way to force a vote on the legislation, now blocked by the Republican filibuster.
“We will finally have an opportunity to debate voting rights legislation – something that Republicans have thus far denied,” Schumer wrote in the memo to his Democratic colleagues. “Senators can finally make clear to the American people where they stand on protecting our democracy and preserving the right of every eligible American to cast a ballot.”
The strategy does little to resolve the central problem that Democrats face – they lack Republican support to pass the elections legislation on a bipartisan basis, but also don’t have support from all 50 Democrats for changing the Senate rules to allow passage on their own. But the latest tactic could create an off-ramp from their initial approach, which was to force a vote by Monday on Senate filibuster changes as a way to pressure Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to go along.
By setting up a debate, Schumer will achieve the Democrats’ goal of shining a spotlight that spurs senators to say where they stand. The floor debate could stretch for days and carry echoes of civil rights battles a generation ago that led to some of the most famous filibusters in Senate history.
“I wouldn’t want to delude anybody into thinking this is easy,” Schumer told reporters Wednesday. He called the push an “uphill fight.”
Democrats have vowed to counteract a wave of new state laws inspired by Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election that have made it harder to vote. But after an initial flurry of activity, the Democrats’ efforts have stalled in the narrowly divided Senate, where they lack the 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, leading to their calls for a rule change.
Recently they have tried to breathe new life into the effort. Biden gave a fiery speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, where he told senators they would each be “judged by history” if they failed to act. He is to meet with Democratic senators at the Capitol on Thursday in a bid to jolt the effort forward.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell gave a scathing rebuttal to Biden’s speech Wednesday, objecting to his comparison of opponents of the voting bills to racist historical figures, including George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who ran for the presidency, and Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the Confederacy.
“You could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than what we’ve just seen: a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure demagoguery,” McConnell, R-Ky. said from the Senate floor Wednesday. “A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power. “
Asked as he walked by Wednesday for a response to McConnell’s comments, Biden turned, removed his black mask and said, “I like Mitch McConnell. He’s a friend.” That response came during Biden’s trip to Capitol to pay his respects to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who died last month and was lying in state in the Rotunda.
Republicans are nearly unanimous in opposing the voting legislation, viewing it as federal overreach that would infringe on states’ abilities to conduct their own elections. And they’ve pointed out that Democrats opposed changes to the filibuster that Trump sought when he was president.
For Democrats and Biden, the legislation is a political imperative. Failure to pass it would break a major campaign promise to Black voters, who helped hand Democrats control of the White House and Congress, and would come just before midterm elections when slim Democratic majorities will be on the line. It would also be the second major setback for Biden’s agenda in a month, after Manchin halted work on the president’s $2 trillion package of social and environmental initiatives shortly before Christmas.
The current package of voting and ethics legislation would usher in the biggest overhaul of U.S. elections in a generation, striking down hurdles to voting enacted in the name of election security, reducing the influence of big money in politics and limiting partisan influence over the drawing of congressional districts. The package would create national election standards that would trump the state-level Republican laws. It would also restore the ability of the Justice Department to police election laws in states with a history of discrimination.
Many civil rights activists think Biden’s push on voting rights is too-little-too-late in aggressively going after Republican-backed changes in state voting laws, which they view as a subtler form of ballot restrictions like literacy tests and poll taxes once used to disenfranchise Black voters. Some boycotted Biden’s speech in Atlanta on Tuesday.
The New Georgia Project, a group founded by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, was among those who called on Biden to skip the speech.
“We’ve heard rhetoric like this before,” the group said in a statement. “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
Schumer had set the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, on Jan. 17, as a deadline to either pass the voting legislation or consider revising the filibuster rules. It’s unclear if a vote on rule changes will still happen.
Possibilities include setting a requirement that 41 senators be present in the chamber to sustain a filibuster.
Manchin threw cold water on the hopes Tuesday, saying he believes any changes should be made with substantial Republican buy-in. And there aren’t any Republican senators willing to sign on.
AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
