Voting rights, hate crimes are on Senate large agenda
WASHINGTON >> Wrapping up the most tumultuous Senate start in recent memory, new Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took stock Thursday of accomplishments including the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 rescue while vowing action ahead on voting rights, hate crimes and mounting Democratic priorities hitting stiff opposition from Republicans.
Far from hiding the expansive role of government emerging from President Joe Biden and Democratic control of Congress, Schumer embraced it. Leading the evenly split Senate, he stopped short of backing filibuster rules changes to advance the agenda. Still, the Democratic leader said coronavirus pandemic has shown that Washington has a role to play in shoring up the nation’s health, economic security and tacking the other priorities.
“Just go out there and talk to the American people,” Schumer said at a press conference at the Capitol.
“COVID has shown so many of the problems in our society,” he said. “So yes, I believe that America is ready for big, bold comprehensive change. That’s what Joe Biden has proposed. His proposals are very popular. That’s some of the things we’ve done.”
Congress is about to pause for a two-week recess after a violent and emotionally wrenching start of the new year. The deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and ongoing pandemic restrictions have frayed relationships. Two elected GOP officials died of COVID-19, one before being sworn into office.
When senators return in April, they are poised for long and arduous debates over the agenda, and even the rules of the Senate.
Democrats are vowing action on several of their top priorities in April, including strengthening hate crime laws to include Asian Americans and restoring voting rights protections to combat minority voter suppression.
Schumer also said the Senate “must take action” on gun control legislation after two mass shootings this month, including one in Georgia that left six Asian American women dead.
Schumer said the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on a voting rights bill named after the late Georgia Rep. John Lewis — a companion to broad legislation Democrats are considering that would be the largest overhaul of U.S. election policy in a generation. It would seek to restore elements of the Voting Rights Act that were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, a decision that Democrats say left minority voters vulnerable to disenfranchisement.
Conspicuously absent from the spring agenda is immigration legislation, reflecting how movement on the issue has slowed in Congress in the face of Republican opposition. Democratic momentum has also been hurt by the Biden administration’s struggle to handle the large and growing numbers of unaccompanied minors seeking to enter the U.S. from Mexico.
Looming over the agenda ahead is Biden’s next big legislative priority, a $3 trillion-plus infrastructure package that will test what so far has been a wall of opposition to much of the White House’s legislative program. All Republicans in the House and Senate voted against the American Rescue Plan, the coronavirus relief package.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said he was heading home to Kentucky to talk to voters about their “confusion and concerns” with the $1.9 trillion package.
McConnell said he also was planning to tell Kentuckians about what’s coming next from Biden and Democrats in the infrastructure plan, which he mocked as a “sequel.”
The prospects of the bills Schumer promoted Thursday becoming law is distant, for now.
Republicans are broadly opposed to most of the Democratic agenda. Lacking the 60 votes needed on most legislation to overcome a filibuster, Schumer is planning to put legislation on the floor anyway and let Republicans go on record opposing it.
Democrats have discussed lowering that 60vote threshold to get the legislation passed and some are pushing for such filibuster rules changes to happen now.