Joe Biden all but concedes defeat on US voting, election bills
- Biden argues that national voting rights bills are needed to save US democracy from Republican tampering with local laws
- Two holdout senators from president’s Democrat party express opposition to Senate ‘filibuster rule’ changes
He spoke on Thursday at the Capitol after a key fellow Democrat, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, dramatically announced her refusal to go along with changing Senate rules to muscle the bill past a Republican filibuster.
Biden had come to the Capitol to prod Democratic senators in a closed-door meeting, but he was not optimistic when he emerged. He vowed to keep fighting for the sweeping legislation that advocates say is vital to protecting elections.
“The honest to God answer is I don’t know whether we can get this done,” Biden said. He told reporters, his voice rising, “As long as I’m in the White House, as long as I’m engaged at all, I’m going to be fighting.”
Sinema all but dashed the bill’s chances minutes earlier, declaring just before Biden arrived on Capitol Hill that she could not support a “short sighted” rules change.
She said in a speech on the Senate floor that the answer to divisiveness in the Senate and in the country is not to change filibuster rules so one party, even hers, can pass controversial bills. “We must address the disease itself, the disease of division, to protect our democracy,” she said.
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Biden spoke for more than an hour in private with restive Democrats in the Senate, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who also opposes changing Senate rules.
Manchin said in a statement later: “Ending the filibuster would be the easy way out. I cannot support such a perilous course for this nation”.
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Both senators went to the White Thursday evening for an additional hour. There was no immediate readout on that discussion.
Since taking control of Congress and the White House last year, Democrats have vowed to counteract a wave of new state laws, inspired by former president Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, that have made it harder to vote. But their efforts have stalled in the narrowly divided Senate, where they lack the 60 votes out of 100 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.
For weeks, Sinema and Manchin have come under intense pressure to support rules changes that would allow the party to pass their legislation with a simple majority – a step both have long opposed.
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Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, called Sinema’s speech an important act of “political courage” that could “save the Senate as an institution” Her own colleagues weren’t as charitable.
Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who once opposed changing the Senate rules said: “She believes that the risk of changing the filibuster is greater than the risk of what’s going on in the states. I hope profoundly that she’s right. I fear that she’s wrong.”
The Democratic package of voting and ethics legislation would usher in the biggest overhaul of US 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 Party laws. It would also restore the ability of the Justice Department to police election laws in states with a history of discrimination.
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Biden’s trip to the Capitol, where he served for decades as a senator from Delaware, was part of weeklong effort to jolt the stalled legislation. On Tuesday he gave a fiery speech in Atlanta, likening opponents of the legislation to racist historical figures and telling lawmakers they will be “judged by history”.
Republicans are nearly unanimous in opposing the 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.
Democrat former president Barack Obama wrote in a USA Today opinion piece on Thursday that the filibuster rule has become a tool for the chamber’s minority to obstruct moves supported by most voters.
“We can’t allow it to be used to block efforts to protect our democracy,” Obama wrote.
Additional reporting by Reuters and Bloomberg
