O’Rourke pushes Biden on voting rights bill
Former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke is using his political platform to turn up the heat on President Joe Biden on voting rights legislation that is unlikely to pass the U.S. Senate, laying the fate of the legislation squarely at Biden’s feet.
O’Rourke held a social media event with U.S. Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-New York, in which O’Rourke declared that the voting rights legislation in Congress is “stalled in the Senate until the president becomes fully engaged. The best way to get the president engaged is to push him to do so.”
“For everyone out there, I think you’ve got your marching orders,” O’Rourke told his followers. “We’ve got to push those in positions of power and public trust — most importantly the president — to do the right thing while we still have time to do the right thing.”
Jones took it a step further, calling it a “great scandal” that Biden is not doing more to force the U.S. Senate to end the filibuster rules that are stalling legislation the Democratic majority wants.
“Why aren’t more people paying attention to that ridiculous fact,” Jones said.
He said Biden gave a speech “diagnosing the problem of the existential threat to our democracy but not actually like giving, you know, a prescription for the problem.”
The U.S. House already has passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the For the People Act, but both have little chance of getting through the U.S. Senate where the Democrats have a slim majority and not enough votes to break a filibuster that Republicans can use to block the legislation.
Those bills have become a major rallying point for Texas House Democrats who have spent much of the summer trying to stall Republican-led legislation in Texas that would add more voting restrictions that Democrats say are aimed at minority voters. Republicans say that’s not the case, and that the legislation is intended to prevent voter fraud.
It’s the same bill that prompted more than 50 Democrats to walk out of a special session in July and head to D.C. to bring attention to the need for federal voting rights legislation.
While the trip produced a lot of public exposure of Texas Democrats, it hasn’t been enough to get the U.S. Senate to vote on the stalled bills. Senate Democrats need 60 votes to break a filibuster. They have 48 members and two independents who vote with them, with Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties in the favor of Democrats.
But pushing Biden to somehow exert pressure on the Democrats in the U.S. Senate to end the filibuster seems like a long shot given Biden’s comments in Cincinnati a month ago. Biden said then that scrapping the filibuster would “throw the entire Congress into chaos” and that “nothing at all will get done.”
O’Rourke has been a key supporter of Biden’s. Just before the Texas presidential primaries, O’Rourke endorsed Biden and took him to dinner at a Whataburger. In addition, O’Rourke’s former campaign manager for his presidential run was Jen O’Malley Dillon, who is now the White House deputy chief of staff.