Setbacks for Biden require ‘stalwart’ effort to unify party, push agenda

Washington: Joe Biden’s ambitious attempt to overhaul voting rights in America is all but dead.

After pleading with his colleagues to ease the passage of two key bills by tweaking the filibuster rules of the Senate, the US President simply couldn’t get the numbers – thwarted as expected, by two rebel Democrats joining Republicans to torpedo the plan.

Joe Biden says he is “profoundly disappointed” that the Senate didn’t adopt his voting rights agenda.Credit: AP

For Biden, the result of the vote is not so much a surprise as a profound disappointment; the latest in a list of setbacks that have underpinned his first year of office: from his “Build Back Better” social policy agenda being stalled before Christmas, to his push for vaccine mandates being struck down by the Supreme Court last week.

With the midterm elections in November, the stakes are obvious. If, as expected, Republicans take back control of Congress, it won’t just make it harder for Biden to deliver on the rest of his first term agenda; it would also make it easier for the return of Donald Trump, who is teasing at another run for office in 2024.

But the developments also exacerbated the simmering tensions in Democratic ranks, with progressives and activists frustrated that the White House didn’t act sooner to advance voting reforms, and furious at the two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who helped block the bills.

The brand damage to Biden is also significant. As a seasoned politician, he campaigned against Trump promising to be a unifier-in-chief whose ability to negotiate with both sides of the aisle was supposedly one of his greatest strengths.

Joe Biden and Barack Obama on the 2020 campaign trail in Michigan.Credit: AP

Yet at a marathon press conference to mark his first year in office, he claimed he “did not anticipate that there would be such a stalwart effort” by Congress to thwart his agenda - a bizarre thing to say for someone who spent years as vice-president under Barack Obama, when Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell was pretty clear about his desire to obstruct the administration at almost every turn.

“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for president Obama to be a one-term president” McConnell said in 2010.

A decade later, McConnell remains consistent in his opposition to a Democratic agenda.

The latest push to reform voting rights centred on two key pieces of legislation that Democrats argued would safeguard future elections after Trump and give disenfranchised communities greater opportunities to have their say.

The first was the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, named after the late Congressman and civil rights leader, which would restore and update federal protections of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The second was the Freedom to Vote Act, which, among other things, would expand opportunities to vote through early or mail-in ballots, allow voters to sue over attempts to set aside valid election outcomes, and make election day a public holiday.

The matter was seen as urgent because in recent months, Republicans have pushed a new wave of voting laws in multiple states that Democrats view as blatant voter suppression, from ballot drop boxes being removed in counties with high numbers of black and brown communities, to restrictions on early or postal voting.

The problem for Biden is that the current Senate is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans who have 50 votes each (with Vice-President Kamala Harris the tie-breaker). Biden was hoping the Senate would support a once-off change to the chamber’s so-called filibuster rule, which requires parties to get at least 60 votes to pass bills and end debate.

Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is a fan of the filibuster.Credit: Getty Images

Republicans, however, viewed it as an attempted “federal takeover of elections”, while Sinema and Manchin – the same two Democrats who stymied Biden’s Build Back Better bill – cited the risk of future parties using the rule change to ram policies through the Senate without a fair vote.

So what comes next for voting rights in America?

In a statement, Biden said he was “profoundly disappointed that the United States Senate has failed to stand up for our democracy” but that he would not be deterred.

However, the President knows he has limited time to get some runs on the board, particularly in the face of growing discontent among the grassroots activists and communities whose support the Democrats will rely on in critical midterm battlegrounds.

One option would be to throw his weight behind a less ambitious proposal that is being discussed by both sides of politics: to rewrite the Electoral Count Act.

In a nutshell, the act was established in 1887 but contains some modern-day risks and ambiguities. For instance, it allows members of Congress to object to counting votes from a state – if one person from the House and one from the Senate writes an objection – but it does not specify what kind of objections are appropriate. Instead, Congress can debate and decide the matter.

In 2005, for instance, some members objected to counting the electoral college votes cast in Ohio for George W. Bush, alleging the results were inaccurate; in 2021 some members objected to them being counted for Biden in Pennsylvania and Arizona.

The concern is that when the objection mechanism is used, it not only results in Congress spending considerable time debating the matter, it can also further erode confidence in democracy.

Senator Mitt Romney supports another attempt at voting reform. Credit: AP

A bipartisan Congressional committee is now seeking to counter this, and recently drafted a report with a range of proposals, including dramatically raising the threshold for objections to a state’s presidential election results.

What’s more, key senators, including McConnell, Manchin and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, have expressed an interest in reforming the act, which gives it a much better chance of surviving than this week’s attempt to blow up the filibuster.

It’s not entirely what Team Biden wanted but at least it’s something. And for a struggling first-term president trying to navigate a hostile Senate, something is better than nothing.

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