WASHINGTON — Democrats failed Wednesday to pass a voting rights package they repeatedly touted as necessary to stamp out voter suppression after Republicans successfully filibustered the bill.
They will now attempt to change the filibuster rule and pass the bill with only Democratic members, but everyone accepts that they do not have the votes for that plan to succeed.
The votes are a culmination of two major political issues facing the country: whether the federal government should step in to reverse state-level laws seen as restricting access to the polls, and whether a minority party in the Senate should have effective veto power over almost all legislation moving through Congress.
Barring a shock, Democrats will end up losing on both fronts, marking a disappointing final day of President Joe Biden’s difficult first year in office. State governments will continue to have broad authority to taper voting laws, and Republicans in the minority will continue to have the power to block progressive legislation.
It was a foregone conclusion that the bill would fail. Biden conceded as much last week. But in a rare move, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pushed the votes forward, despite tension and disagreement over changing the filibuster within his party. Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia both voted to move the voting rights bill forward but have insisted they will vote against changing the Senate rules to allow it to pass.
Manchin said he could not support one party changing Senate rules “through raw majority power” without the cooperation of the full chamber. “Let the change happen this way and it will be a body without rules,” he said on the floor Wednesday afternoon.
In an afternoon press conference, Biden refused to give up on making progress on voting rights through the rest of his term. “We’re not there yet. We’ve not run out of options yet. We’ll see how this moves,” he said.
Named after John Lewis, the late civil rights icon and member of Congress, the voting rights package would have rolled back dozens of state-level access restrictions, mandate at least 15 days of early voting, make Election Day a federal holiday, and allow the courts and federal government to intervene if a state passes restrictions that target voters of ethnic and racial minorities.
Last year, Republicans put in place 33 laws across 19 states to make voting more restrictive.
The Senate filibuster evokes the image of senators talking for hours to block legislation, but in fact senators can filibuster a bill just by staying home. The Senate rules require at least 60 votes in the 100-seat chamber to end debate and move to a final vote. This allows for a minority of senators to block legislation.
In the current 50-50 split Senate, with Democrats only in control because Vice President Kamala Harris casts tie-breaking votes, there was no chance of bypassing the filibuster. But while it takes 60 votes to pass a bill, a simple majority of senators can vote to do away with the filibuster — either entirely or in certain circumstances. This process is often referred to as the “nuclear option.”
While many Democrats support getting rid of the filibuster altogether, Wednesday’s vote would carve out an exception for this bill only.
The Senate deadlocked along party lines on the voting rights bill, well short of the 60 needed. Schumer will soon put forward a vote to change the rules so that senators can continue to filibuster by talking — but eventually debate would end and a vote would commence. That is expected to fail with Sinema and Manchin defecting.
The filibuster has become a powerful tool of obstruction. When he was majority leader, Mitch McConnell boasted about turning the Senate into a graveyard of progressive legislation. Thanks to the filibuster, he can maintain that status quo in the minority.
At the same time, frustration with the rules has caused both parties to pass exemptions when they have been in the majority. Former Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid nuked the filibuster via a majority vote for some judicial nominations during the Obama years. He said it was necessary to bypass Republican obstruction.
When Donald Trump was president, McConnell erased the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations when Democrats blocked him from getting 60 votes to confirm Neil Gorsuch.
McConnell also took an aggressive approach to budget reconciliation bills, which are exempt from the filibuster. Typically used to simply authorize spending for the year, Republicans tried to use budget reconciliation to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
That ultimately fell short, but Democrats are now attempting to use budget reconciliation to pass practically all of their domestic and climate change agenda via the Build Back Better Act. That bill currently remains stalled in the Senate due to opposition from Manchin.
The filibuster now sits on odd historic ground. Both parties aggressively use the filibuster and aggressively circumvent it. Many believe its days are numbered.
The filibuster is not mentioned in the Constitution and in fact arose from a gap in the country’s founding documents. There was no mechanism for ending debate in the Senate until 1917, when senators voted to adopt a rule to close debate with a vote of two-thirds of the chamber. In 1975, that threshold was lowered to 60 votes. In some of its earliest years as a tool in the Senate, the filibuster was repeatedly used by Southern senators to block civil rights and anti-lynching legislation.
While Republicans were unanimously opposed to the broader voting rights package, some have expressed openness to reforming the Electoral Count Act of 1887. That law lays out how Congress counts and certifies Electoral College votes in a presidential election.
Trump and his allies had hoped to exploit ambiguities in that law to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That would have involved Vice President Mike Pence rejecting the state-approved slate of electors and potentially replacing them with pro-Trump slates. Pence did not go along with the idea and approved the state electors who confirmed Biden won the presidency.
Some senators have talked about rewriting the bill to make it explicit that the vice president plays only a procedural role and does not have the discretion to reject the electors sent by the state. It is not clear whether there is enough Republican support to amend the law. Biden expressed confidence in changing that law during his news conference Wednesday.
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