Senate sinks push for voting rights reforms
Democrats were unable to push through the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Senators have dealt a death blow to Joe Biden’s push to defend voting rights against what Democrats frame as an all-out assault by conservative states targeting racial minorities.
Faced with a blockade from Republicans complaining of federal overreach, the Democrats were unable to push through the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act passed by the House of Representatives last week.
“I am profoundly disappointed that the Senate has failed to stand up for our democracy. I am disappointed — but I am not deterred,” the President said in a statement on social media after the vote on Thursday (AEDT).
Democrats and voting rights activists have championed the measures as a necessary response to Republican efforts to restrict voting, especially among black and Latino American voters.
“I know this is not 1965. That’s what makes me so outraged. It’s 2022, and they’re blatantly removing more polling places from the counties where blacks and Latinos are overrepresented,” New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker said on the floor of the Senate. “I’m not making that up. That is a fact.”
Conservative states spent the last year leveraging Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud to introduce a slate of regulations that make voting more difficult. The legislation would have guaranteed the right to mail-in voting, ballot drop boxes and at least two weeks of early voting — as well as making election day a national holiday. It also addressed the gerrymander of congressional districts and would have required states with a history of discrimination to get federal clearance before changing election law.
But all 50 Republicans voted against the reforms, arguing that restrictions such as limiting mail-in voting and insisting on voter identification were simply common sense. “The concern is misplaced. If you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high percentage as America,” Senate Republican leader Mitch said ahead of the vote.
Democrats hold a technical majority of one in the evenly split Senate, with Vice-President Kamala Harris able to act as a tiebreaker on 50-50 votes. With no Republicans breaking ranks, Democrats were unable to overcome the filibuster —the 60-vote threshold required to take bills to a vote in the Senate.
Democrat majority leader Chuck Schumer tried to lower the bar to break filibusters specifically for voting rights. Senator Schumer proposed reinstating the “talking filibuster”, forcing Republicans to speak on the floor to sustain their opposition, and introducing a limited carve-out exemption from the 60-vote threshold. That manoeuvre also fell short, as moderate Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema sided with Republicans to vote no.
AFP
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