Voting rights groups tell Biden they want action, not 'platitudes,' as he travels to Georgia for speech
WASHINGTON – Just days after he warned of “a dagger at the throat of democracy,” President Joe Biden endorsed a limited exception to the Senate filibuster in order to pass federal voting rights legislation.
Arguing the future of democracy is at stake, Biden urged Congress to pass two voting rights bills that have stalled in the Senate and threw his support behind an effort to exempt the measures from a GOP filibuster so they could be put to a vote.
“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation's history," Biden said. "The issue is, will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over injustice? I know where I stand."
Biden's remarks in Atlanta, on the heels of his blunt post-mortem on the Jan. 6 mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, come as liberals in the Democratic Party demand a more aggressive approach from the White House to muscling the bills through Congress.
Civil rights leaders are increasingly frustrated over the Democrats' failure to pass two bills that would expand voting protections. One of the Democratic Party's most prominent voting rights advocates, Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, did not attend Biden's speech on Tuesday.
An Abrams aide said she had a scheduling conflict. But her absence was notable, given her star power on voting rights and the White House's renewed focus on the issue.
Because the Senate is divided 50-50, Republicans can filibuster the bills and block them from advancing, unless Democrats push for a change in the rules. Biden, who served 36 years as a senator from Delaware, said he would support changing the rules to exempt the voting rights bills from the filibuster because Republicans have abused the process and "because the threat to our democracy is so grave."
Voting rights advocates say the situation has become urgent, as more Republican-led states move to limit access to the polls.
Nineteen Republican-led states passed 34 laws to restrict access to voting last year, fueled by former President Donald Trump and his supporters' false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. There is no evidence of widespread voting irregularities, and courts have dismissed more than 60 GOP-led lawsuits alleging fraud.
“The president needs to make clear just how bad it has gotten and why it is so important for Congress” to protect voting rights, said Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit public policy group that has tracked state efforts to restrict voting rights.
"2021 was a year like nothing we've seen before," Morales-Doyle said, and “there's every reason to expect that we're looking at another bad year this year.”
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Honoring the Kings
Biden, who was accompanied by Vice President Kamala Harris, made his push for voting rights during remarks at the Atlanta University Center Consortium on the grounds of Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College.
Before his address, Biden placed a wreath at the crypt of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. Biden and Harris also visited the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was ordained and served as co-pastor until his assassination in 1968.
Biden was accompanied by a cadre of Democratic lawmakers and civil rights leaders during his Atlanta visit, including members of the Georgia delegation such as Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, Reps. Sanford Bishop, Carolyn Bourdeaux, Hank Johnson, Lucy McBath and Nikema Williams.
Abrams welcomed Biden to Georgia in a message on Twitter and thanked him "for refusing to relent until the work is finished."
The family of the late civil rights leader King joined Biden on his trip to The King Center.
Biden’s choice of Georgia for a major voting rights address is no accident. The state has a rich history entwined with the struggle for civil rights – one that activists warn is under assault. After Biden beat Trump in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, the state became one of the first to put in place more restrictive voting laws.
Georgia was also the home of the late Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon for whom one of the voting rights bills now stalled in the Senate is named.
Biden has given multiple speeches and statements over the past year calling on Congress to protect “the sacred right to vote.”
A turning point in voting rights reform?
In South Carolina last month, he decried what he called “a new sinister combination of voter suppression and election subversion” and promised to "keep up the fight until we get it done." Last week, while marking one year after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, Biden vowed to “make sure the will of the people is heard, that the ballot prevails, not violence.”
But civil rights activists were hoping that his speech in Georgia would signal a turning point in the push to advance the two voting rights bills that are stalled in the Senate.
“What we want them to do is not so much a speech but an announcement,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, a voting rights organization based in Georgia. Albright noted that Biden will be accompanied to Georgia by the state’s two senators on a day when the legislators could otherwise be in Washington passing his voting rights agenda.
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Black Votes Matter and a coalition of other groups that support voting rights legislation issued a statement last week condemning “political platitudes and repetitious, bland promises” and urged Biden not to bother visiting Georgia unless he has a concrete plan to pass the Senate bills.
“Anything less is insufficient and unwelcome,” said the statement, which also was signed by the Asian American Advocacy Fund, the GALEO Impact Action Fund, and The New Georgia Project Action Fund.
Over 100 voting rights leaders and grassroots activists also are scheduled to gather in Washington on Jan. 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and demand passage of the legislation. The activists are expected to join King’s son, Martin Luther King III, and other members of his family for a march toward the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, where they plan to remind Biden and Democrats that they managed to pass another priority, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.
Their message to Biden and Senate Democrats: “You delivered for bridges. Now deliver voting rights.”
'A sustained attack on our democracy'
The two voting rights bills already have passed the House but remain in limbo in the Senate because of unified Republican opposition. The Senate is split 50-50 among Democrats and Republicans, although Democrats technically hold a majority because of the vice president’s ability to cast a tie-breaking vote.
One of the bills – the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act – would revive federal oversight of state voting rights laws weakened by recent Supreme Court decisions.
Specifically, the bill would restore the Justice Department’s power to review changes in election laws in states with a history of discrimination. The legislation also would give the Justice Department more authority, in all states, to block or overturn redistricting maps and state laws, including voter ID requirements and restrictions on voting by mail.
The other bill, known as the Freedom to Vote Act, would set minimum voting standards, including for early voting options, voting by mail and allowing for same-day registration on Election Day, which would be designated as a federal holiday. It also would specify how the boundaries of congressional districts can be drawn to avoid giving one party too much of an advantage.
Democrats would need at least 60 votes to override a GOP filibuster, a parliamentary maneuver that allows the minority party to block legislation with prolonged debate
Unable to get 60 votes in the evenly divided Senate, some Democrats are pushing their leaders to change the filibuster rules so that the voting rights bills could be approved with a simple majority.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., warned last week that Democrats will try to exempt voting rights legislation from the filibuster unless Republicans allow the bills to advance by Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
But changing the filibuster would require all 50 Senate Democrats to agree to amend the rule. Two Democrats – Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – have said they won’t vote to amend the filibuster rule, raising doubts about the success of that strategy.
For Biden and the Democrats, the political stakes of failing to pass the legislation are enormous heading into this year’s midterm elections. Democrats can’t afford to disappoint liberals and voters of color when they already are expected to lose congressional seats in the upcoming elections.
Morales-Doyle said Biden should use his speech to spell out for Americans what is at stake if Congress fails to pass voting rights legislation.
"We are facing a sustained attack on our democracy like we've really never seen before," he said.
But voting rights activists said they won’t be impressed by rhetoric alone.
“When he’s able to show us a piece of paper signed in blood from Manchin and Sinema saying that they guarantee they will do filibuster reform and pass voting rights, that's the kind of announcement that we want to see that would be worth his trip here,” Albright said.
Michael Collins and Matthew Brown cover the White House. Reach Collins on Twitter @mcollinsNEWS and Brown @mrbrownsir.
Contributing: Maureen Groppe and Joey Garrison
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