538: Why A Failed Voting Rights Push Is A Setback For Democracy -- And Democrats
The carefully calibrated unity formed among the Democratic Party and its base on voting rights was short-lived. After the White House announced earlier this month that President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would travel to Georgia to give an impassioned plea on preserving the right to vote — despite not having enough voting power to take any meaningful action — activists mounted a lobbying blitz encouraging leadership to stay in Washington, D.C.
Their frustration was obvious: For over a year, Democrats had been repeating platitudes about the importance of voting rights and preserving American democracy, yet Congress had accomplished nothing on that front. And the trip to Georgia, according to some activists, was just another example of leadership doing nothing more than paying lip service to being pro-democratic.
“We don’t need even more photo ops. We need action, and that action is in the form of the John Lewis Voting Rights [Advancement] Act as well as the Freedom to Vote Act, and we need that immediately,” Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, recently told reporters.
But that didn’t happen. The party’s endgame for its current voting rights bills — to use a legislative loophole to bypass an initial Republican filibuster and debate a mash-up of the original Freedom to Vote Act and John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — failed on Wednesday. Without any GOP support, Democrats were unable to clear the 60-vote threshold required to pass legislation. (The party’s final effort to impose a “talking filibuster,” which would allow the bill to pass with just a simple majority, is expected to fail as well, as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have refused to back down in their opposition to altering Senate procedure.)
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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-a-failed-voting-rights-push-is-a-setback-for-democracy-and-democrats/
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