Senate GOP blocks election bill from Dems for 3rd time
WASHINGTON — For the third time this year, Senate Democrats on Wednesday tried to pass sweeping elections legislation that they tout as a powerful counterweight to new voting restrictions in the states.
Once again, Republicans blocked them.
But amid the stalemate, there are signs that Democrats are making headway in their effort to create consensus around changing Senate procedural rules, a key step that could allow them to muscle transformative legislation through the narrowly divided chamber.
Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, recently eased his longstanding opposition to changing the filibuster rules, which create a 60-vote threshold for most legislation to pass.
“I’ve concluded that democracy itself is more important than any Senate rule,” said King, who acknowledged that weakening the filibuster would likely prove to be a “double-edged sword” under a Republican majority.
Democrats still face long odds of passing the Freedom to Vote Act, which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., excoriated Wednesday as a federal “election takeover scheme.”
But the softening of King’s stance on the filibuster amounts to incremental progress for Senate Democrats.
“What we can’t accept is a situation where one side is calling for bipartisan debate and bipartisan cooperation while the other refuses to even engage in
a dialogue,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said from the chamber’s floor.
The Democrats’ voting bill was first introduced in March in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol. It quickly passed the House at a time when Republican-controlled legislatures — many inspired by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election — were advancing restrictions in the name of election security that will make it harder to vote and could make the administration of the elections more subject to partisan interference.
As written, the current “compromise” version of the bill would establish national rules for running elections, limit partisanship in the drawing of congressional districts and force the disclosure of many anonymous
donors who spend big to influence elections.
Other provisions are aimed at alleviating concerns from local elections officials, who worried that the original bill would have been too difficult to implement. And some new additions are aimed at insulating nonpartisan election officials, who may be subject to greater partisan pressure under some of the new state laws.
It also includes a number of changes sought by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the chamber’s most conservative Democrat and who also opposes ending the filibuster, including a provision that would limit, but not prohibit, state voter ID requirements.
But so far, those changes have not attracted the Republican support that Manchin was seeking.