Biden tries shaming senators as a last resort
Pressure has failed. Negotiation has failed. Allowing Sen. Joe Manchin to craft his own voting rights bill has failed.
So President Joe Biden turned to shame on Tuesday, thundering at US senators that they'll be siding with the Confederate President Jefferson Davis over the American President Abraham Lincoln if they don't vote to change Senate rules. Biden called for sidestepping the filibuster in a procedural vote by next Monday to move toward a vote on a new national voting rights standard.
American voters gave Biden the bully pulpit of the presidency, but they didn't give Democrats enough votes to end the filibuster in the Senate.
That's the context behind the speech Biden delivered Tuesday in Atlanta, which was nominally about voting rights but in the President's telling symbolizes so much more. See his choice of words: "democracy over autocracy," "light over shadows," "justice over injustice."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-tries-shaming-senators-as-a-last-resort/ar-AASGfqg
'Let the majority prevail': Biden backs filibuster change to pass voting rights in Atlanta speech
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden on Tuesday called for a limited exception to the Senate filibuster to pass federal voting rights legislation, yielding to demands from Democrats and civil rights advocates to take a more aggressive stance on preserving ballot access.
In his most forceful plea yet for election changes, Biden endorsed altering the Senate rules "whichever way they need to be changed" to bypass Republican opposition to two voting rights bills in the Senate. The president initially had resisted the rules change even as Republican-led states enacted a spate of new voting restrictions.
"Let the majority prevail," he said at the Atlanta University Center Consortium on the grounds of Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College. "Today, I'm making it clear, to protect our democracy, I support changing the Senate rules, whichever way they need to be changed, to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights."
Biden, who described himself as an institutionalist, said he made the decision with careful deliberation to "protect our democracy."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/let-the-majority-prevail-biden-backs-filibuster-change-to-pass-voting-rights-in-atlanta-speech/ar-AASFTpc
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