The harsh speeches and the impassioned speech of the President of the United States, Joe Biden, did not prevent his party from suffering two consecutive defeats on Wednesday night (19).
In the first round, the effort by Democrats to try to make voting rights more robust was outperformed by Republicans for the fifth time in less than a year.
For this, congressmen from the party of former President Donald Trump resorted to the “filibuster”, a procedure that allows to stop the processing of measures. Through this provision, those who are a minority in the House can ask for a debate in the plenary of a given project under analysis, postponing the vote indefinitely, since the discussion can only be closed with the support of 60 of the 100 senators.
Today, Democrats are hostage to the measure, as they have 50 lawmakers. The fragile majority is only guaranteed by the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris – and only if the 50 Democrats vote in consensus, which was not the case this Wednesday.
After suffering the first defeat of the legislative session, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer proposed a vote to reduce the number of votes required to pass bills from 60 to 50. It would be a way to circumvent the “filibuster” that, in practice, would make it more viable to process important measures of the current administration.
But it lacked agreement with the Democrats themselves. Two of them, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, voted with the 50 Republicans, totaling 52 votes against the measure. All the other 48 Democrats spoke out in favor of changing the obstruction rule.
In addition to putting the last nail in the coffin of hope to change the “filibuster”, Manchin and Sinema had already been one of the main obstacles to the approval of a trillion-dollar social investment package proposed by Biden.
One of his arguments is that, in the future, Democrats will eventually revert to being in the minority, and then they will have less power to block Republican projects without the obstruction rule. Thus, one way out would be not to terminate the resource altogether, but to prevent its use in specific cases, such as questions about voting rights.
The bill to protect voting rights, which had been approved by the House and has now been buried once again by the Senate, provides for standardizing procedures such as voter registration, voting by mail, access to locations with ballot boxes and campaign donation control —today, each state sets its own rules.
Another proposal, dubbed the John Lewis Act, proposes easing access for blacks, Latinos and other historically excluded groups to elections in some US states, especially in the South, and provides for punishments for local governments that insist on restrictive measures.
The projects are a response by the Democratic Party to what has been happening in recent months. At least 19 states where there is a Republican majority in the legislature have passed additional restrictions on voting. Biden called this wave “Jim Crow 2.0”, in reference to the measures taken after the liberation of enslaved blacks to prevent them from having basic rights and to establish that they live segregated and distant from politics.
Measures considered restrictive do not directly prohibit people from voting, but make the process more difficult. The list of tactics includes requiring specific documents, creating obstacles to voter registration, restricting postal voting, and reducing polling places and their hours of operation so long lines discourage participation.
Another practice is called “gerrymandering”, a redesign of constituencies to favor one party. In the US, generally, each district elects only one candidate. Thus, the strategy allows changes in the electoral map in order to grant advantages to the party in power.
This whole scenario again exposes the growing polarization in the US. On the one hand, Democrats argue that their proposals would help to heal the wounded American democracy after the years under Trump and especially after the Capitol Hill invasion — the height of the recent crisis.
On the other side are Republicans claiming that there is no threat to voting rights. For them, this is an invention of the Democrats, and little or nothing needs to be done to change the way states already run the electoral system.
As the dispute still rages in the Senate, Biden told a news conference that there is no reason to give up hope of progress on the voting rights issue. “We are still not out of options,” said the president.
It’s unclear what those options would be, and it’s unclear what the Democrats’ next move will be. But ten months before the midterm elections, the president’s party will need dexterity and agility if it wants to prevent the election from reversing the Democratic majority scenario and making the Biden administration’s agenda even more difficult.
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