‘Where is the president?’ The fight for voting rights is running out of time. Advocates want Biden to step up

Biden suggests protecting the right to vote is one of the defining battles of his time. Democrats are running out of it, and activists need help from the White House, writes Alex Woodward

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A myth that Democrats and the “deep state” conspired to not only steal an election from Donald Trump, and then deliberately disarmed police protecting the Capitol from the mob that believed it, permeates a party that has propped up election lies behind a wave of restrictive voting bills across the US.

That’s the party that many congressional Democrats believe can still, somehow, get behind protecting voting rights, or infrastructure spending, or combatting the climate crisis, or other measures critical to their agenda – which Republicans have pledged to destroy before demolishing their opponents in midterm elections next year.

Republicans have accused Democrats of staging a “takeover” and “power grab” of elections – while GOP lawmakers in nearly every state have filed dozens of bills to give themselves the authority to control them, and then filibuster voting rights bills to death in the Senate.

Under current filibuster rules, the senate requires at least 60 votes from the 100-member body to move legislation forward, which means Democrats need to muster at least 10 Republican votes to advance their agenda

In urging support for the For The People Act, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a stark assessment of the state of voting rights in the US: “Democracy is in peril” and “the right to vote – a sacred right in this country – is under assault with an intensity and an aggressiveness we have not seen in a long time.”

Hours later, Republicans simply rejected a call to debate the bill before a vote could be held, effectively killing it with a 50-50 vote.

Democrats and the White House have tried to twist the vote into a victory, one in which Democrats stood unanimously against a Republican blockade in the name of protecting the right to vote. In a kind of theatre, Senate Democrats put on the record what we already know: Republicans don’t support federal voting rights protections.

“Is saving democracy a priority for this administration or not?” asked Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin. “Right-wing zealots are systematically dismantling our democratic institutions. I don’t want to see some tepid public statement. ... Where is the president?”

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With Joe Biden’s dire warnings about the fragile state of American democracy, and a united front among congressional Democrats to support passage of the bill, in some form or another, progressive lawmakers and advocates have suggested Democrats forgot that they hold a majority in the House of Representatives, and have control of the White House, and the slimmest majority in an evenly divided Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris can cast a tie-breaking vote on a bulk of their legislation.

But only if they’re willing to amend the filibuster.

The White House has refused to get into the filibuster debate, and at least two Senate Democrats won’t touch it. A general ambivalence among Democrats has now shaped into a rationale that the only defensible reason they could consider reforming the filibuster is because Republicans forced them to, unwillingly.

“The people did not give Democrats the House, Senate and White House to compromise with insurrectionists,” US Rep Ayanna Pressley said. “Abolish the filibuster so we can do the people’s work.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki has defended the White House response, which includes dispatching the vice president to meet with voting rights advocates while Mr Biden delivers the occasional emotional remarks telling Americans that voting rights are important.

In remarks on 23 June, the vice president said she is “addressing what must happen in those states where legislation has already passed to empower voters, and to navigate the system that has been tampered with,” adding that the US is at “an inflection point” in the fight to preserve voting rights.

“I have been engaged in this work my whole career, and we are going to be ramping up our efforts,” the president said in a statement after the Senate vote on 22 June.

None of that is stopping Mitch McConnell, who vowed to give “no quarter” to voting rights bills.

Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Chris Coons have both argued that if they were to amend those rules to pass laws today, a future Congress under Republican control could do so tomorrow – suggesting that Democrats are willing to cede control of their own agenda to Republicans now to prevent an all-out Republican assault when Democrats lose control of Congress.

Now the filibuster – a relic of Jim Crow parliamentary procedure invoked by segregationists – may also prevent Democrats from restoring the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights law revived by presidents of both parties since it was first passed in 1965, to be named after late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis.

Senator McConnell now says it’s “unnecessary”.

In 2013, the US Supreme Court 2013 struck out key parts of the law that prohibited states with histories of discrimination at the polls to change their election laws without federal “preclearance”.

A wave of restrictive voting legislation followed, culminating in the coordinated campaign to undermine ballot access in the name of “election integrity” after Republicans lost Congress and the White House in 2020 elections.

The minority leader – repeating the same arguments against voting rights measures from decades earlier – said it’s “against the law to discriminate in voting based on race already.”

The high court is also poised to undermine the Voting Rights Act a second time, as justices mull the constitutionality of two GOP-backed voting restrictions in Arizona. A decision could be issued as soon as this week.

If the Biden administration has pointed to voting rights as one of the defining fights of his time in office, Democrats are running out of it.