GOP Blocks Voting Bill By Using Filibuster Democrats Were Trying To Amend

Voting legislation that Democrats and civil rights groups argued is vital for protecting democracy was blocked tonight by a Republican filibuster, a setback for President Joe Biden and his party after a raw, emotional debate.

Democrats were poised to immediately pivot to voting on a Senate rules change as a way to overcome the filibuster and approve the bill with a simple majority. But the rules change was also headed toward defeat, as Biden has been unable to persuade two holdout senators in his own party, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, to change the Senate procedures for this one bill.

“This is not just another routine day in the Senate, this is a moral moment,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga.

The initial vote was 49-51, short of the 60 votes needed to advance over the filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., voted no for procedural reasons so Democrats can revisit the legislation.

The nighttime voting capped a day of piercing debate that carried echoes of an earlier era when the Senate filibuster was deployed in lengthy speeches by opponents of civil rights legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other top Democrats said they are determined to push forward with a floor confrontation regardless, even as it promises to expose bitter divisions inside their own party rather than amplify a GOP blockade that they have described as an existential threat to democracy.

“We’re under no illusion – we know this is an uphill fight, especially when virtually every Senate Republican, to their shame, is staunchly against any legislation to protect the right to vote,” Schumer told reporters Tuesday night. “But I want to be clear – when this chamber confronts the question this important, one so vital to our country, to our democracy, with its long history – you don’t just say, ‘Never mind, it’s too hard.’ You keep pushing. You keep working. You keep fighting.”

In a bid to overcome the minority opposition, Democrats coalesced Tuesday around a plan to modify the Senate’s debate rules only for the pending voting rights legislation. While current rules require 60 senators to vote to close debate and move to a final vote, Schumer said he will propose enforcing a two-speech-maximum rule for each senator. Once debate is fully exhausted under those terms, the Senate could move to a final vote at a simple majority threshold.

But the two holdout Democrats and scores of Republicans warned that there could be no simple exception for the pending bill – any attempt to exempt legislation from the 60-vote rule would inevitably lead to the permanent end of the Senate filibuster as it currently exists.

Manchin confirmed his intention to oppose the rules change in a floor speech Wednesday afternoon, when he accused fellow Democrats of misrepresenting the history of the filibuster, which has evolved over the Senate’s 232-year history but has generally served to protect the rights of the minority party.

In recent decades, it has become a tool of routine legislative obstruction utilized by both parties, but Manchin argued that did not necessitate fundamentally changing the nature of the Senate along party lines. Any such move, he warned, would only exacerbate poisonous political divisions among Americans.

“I cannot support such a perilous course for this nation when elected leaders are sent to Washington to unite our country, not to divide our country,” he said. “We’re called the United States, not the divided states, and putting politics and party aside is what we’re supposed to do.”

Sinema did not speak on the floor Wednesday, but she made her position clear in a speech last week, delivered just before President Joe Biden arrived on Capitol Hill to lobby Democrats at a private Senate lunch. She sat at her desk on the Senate floor for much of Wednesday’s debate, listening to speakers of both parties.

Both Democrats’ views have remained firm as numerous other Senate Democrats have changed their views on the filibuster, backing the need for changes after defending the rule earlier in their careers – including during the Trump administration, when Republicans held unified control of the White House and Congress from 2017 to 2019.

In remarks to reporters Wednesday afternoon, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., cast the vote in momentous terms, while accusing Democrats of seeking to fundamentally remake the institution to secure partisan political advantage.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say this is the biggest day in the history of the Senate, because we’re dealing with the Senate as an institution,” McConnell said. “These radicals on the other side, to get their own way, are prepared to break the United States Senate by taking steps almost all of them decried as recently as a couple of years ago.”

The final push for action has included a major Atlanta address last week from Biden, a former six-term senator, who threw his support behind changing the filibuster after concluding, he said, that democracy was at critical risk.

“The United States Senate, designed to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, has been rendered a shell of its former self,” Biden said. “I believe that the threat to our democracy is so grave that we must find a way to pass these voting rights bills.”

On Wednesday, Sens. Mark Kelly, Ariz., and Chris Coons, Del., became the latest Democrats to publicly back a rules change after keeping mum for months on the question. Coons, a Biden confidant, said he backed a “narrow and temporary” filibuster exception aimed at upholding fundamental rights, while Kelly, who faces reelection later this year, said his constituents “deserve a Senate that is more responsive to the challenges facing our country.”

“Protecting the vote-by-mail system used by a majority of Arizonans and getting dark money out of our elections is too important to let fall victim to Washington dysfunction,” Kelly said, outlining a position that notably breaks with Sinema, his fellow Arizona Democrat.

But Manchin and Sinema have resisted a blitz of pressure from political organizations, civil rights groups and their own colleagues, who have all made the case that the threat to democracy posed by a spate of Republican-passed state voting restrictions outweighs the need to preserve the filibuster.

On Tuesday, for instance, a key fundraising group backing Democratic women who favor abortion rights, Emily’s List, announced it would not support Sinema in a future Democratic primary should she oppose the rules change. The NAACP also made a final appeal to Senate Democrats to support “what may be our last hope to save our democracy.”

“Democratic senators: what good is preserving a dysfunctional tradition of bipartisanship if bipartisanship cannot even preserve democracy? It is morally inconsistent to praise voting rights legislation while allowing a procedural rule to tank it,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson wrote in a letter.

The last-ditch appeals did not appear to move either of the two holdout senators. Sinema noted in a statement responding to Emily’s List that the 60-vote rule “has been used repeatedly to protect against wild swings in federal policy, including in the area of protecting women’s health care.”

Manchin, meanwhile, insisted the Democratic proposal amounted to an attempt to “break the rules to change the rules.”

Manchin added that Democrats could opt to keep the voting rights legislation on the Senate floor for days or weeks longer, working to invite amendments and build GOP support that has been elusive over months of back-channel negotiations.

“We’ve wasted a year behind the scenes,” he said. “Talking through each other, around each other, but not to each other. Let’s have the debate.”

The suggestion mystified several of Manchin’s colleagues, who said that Republicans have been uninterested in having any kind of debate on voting rights whatsoever.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., lamented an “incredibly dysfunctional” institution that had seen compromise wither as senators use the filibuster power to simply block action.

“I had this idea in my head that being in the United States Senate would be a place we could have debate,” he said. “But it simply doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen because we’re not forced to do it. . . . All you have to do is put a hold on a bill and walk out.”

While defeat appeared ensured, Democrats on Wednesday moved forward with a day-long final debate on the issue. Party leaders encouraged Democratic senators to remain at their desks on the Senate floor, as the final vote approaches, to emphasize the gravity of the issue. While GOP attendance was more sparse, more than a dozen Republican senators delivered floor speeches rebutting the Democrats throughout the day.

There were moments of strong words and pointed emotion, as well as occasional exchanges between members of opposite parties that resembled the sort of bygone, freewheeling debates that many senators say should be a more routine feature of an institution that was once deemed, in seriousness that has evolved into sarcasm, the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

In one notable speech, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., accused Democrats of peddling a “negative, false narrative of what is happening to America” by referring to the new state laws as “Jim Crow 2.0” and making comparisons to the depravities suffered by Black Americans before and during the civil rights era.

“As I keep hearing the references to Jim Crow, I ask myself how many Americans understand what Jim Crow was,” said Scott, the Senate’s only Black Republican, calling the comparison “offensive not just to me or Southern Americans, but offensive to millions of Americans who fought, bled and died for the right to vote.”

That drew a response from Cory Booker, D-N.J., a fellow Black senator, who countered that Democrats were simply dealing with the fact that “it is more difficult for the average African American to vote than the average White American.”

“Don’t lecture me about Jim Crow,” he later said. “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. I’m not making that up. That is a fact.”

While acknowledging the likely outcome in a floor speech Wednesday morning, Schumer made a final public appeal to the holdouts, asking them to prioritize the preservation of voting rights over the preservation of the filibuster in its current form.

“Isn’t protecting voting rights and preventing their diminution more important than a rule in the Senate that has not always been in existence and was not envisioned by the founders?” he said. “That is the question we should ask ourselves.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have shown little hesitation in continuing their opposition to the Democratic voting legislation, which combines an effort to restore portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that have been struck down in recent years by the Supreme Court with a broader effort to establish new national standards for federal elections, including minimum requirements for early voting, vote by mail and other election conveniences that have been limited in some states by the GOP legislatures.

In four Senate votes held since June on various voting bills, only one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska, cast one vote on one bill to proceed with debate. Other Republicans have rallied around a position staked out early last year by McConnell holding that the federal government should have no additional role in regulating state elections, despite the Constitution’s clear reservation of a federal role in elections for federal office.

Speaking from the Senate floor on Wednesday, McConnell sharply denounced the Democrats’ push to change both voting laws and the Senate’s rules as part of a “shortsighted power grab,” one rooted in mischaracterizations of the new state laws and partisan hyperbole.

“The case that most of our Democratic colleagues are making this week boils down to a claim that everything is somehow broken – the Senate is broken because they can’t get everything they want, our democracy is broken because Democrats sometimes lose elections . . . that governing institutions that have served us for centuries need to be smashed and steamrolled,” he said, adding, “The fear is false, the rage is misplaced, and today, factional fevers will not carry the day.”

(c) 2022, The Washington Post · Mike DeBonis 

{Matzav.com}