Dems mount bid to counter GOP on voting curbs

Democrats have seized on new voting restrictions in Georgia to focus attention on the fight to overhaul federal election laws, setting up a building standoff that carries echoes of the civil rights battles of a halfcentury ago.

In fiery speeches, pointed statements and tweets, party leaders decried the law signed Thursday by the state’s Republican governor as specifically aimed at suppressing Black and Latino votes and a threat to democracy. President Biden released an extended statement, calling the law an attack on “good conscience” that denies the right to vote for “countless” Americans.

“This is Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” Biden said, referring to laws of the last century that enforced heavyhanded racial segregation in the South. He told reporters the Georgia law is an “atrocity” and the Justice Department is looking into it.

Behind the chorus of outrage, Democrats are also wrestling with the limits on their power in Washington, as long as Senate filibuster rules allow Republicans to block major legislation, including H.R. 1, a sweeping elections bill now pending in the Senate.

Biden and his party are seeking to build and sustain momentum in the realm of public opinion, hoping to nationalize what has so far been a Republicanled statebystate movement to curb access to the ballot. Allies meanwhile plan to fight the Georgia law, and others, in court.

“What’s happening in Georgia right now, underscores the importance and the urgency,” said Sen. Rev. Raphael Warnock, DGa. “This is about what is fundamental to our identity as an American people — one person, one vote.”

The emerging brawl over the politics and policy of voting access is swelling like nothing seen in recent years, harkening back to what many Americans may assume are wellsettled rules ensuring equal access to the ballot.

But as Republicancontrolled state legislatures from Georgia to Iowa to Arizona are taking dramatic action to limit early voting and force new voter ID requirements, the debate in Washington threatens to exacerbate the nation’s cavernous political divides in the early days of the Biden presidency, just as the Democratic president vows to unite the country.

It is expected to be a monthslong slog in the narrowly divided Congress, specifically the Senate, where Democrats are, for now, unwilling to muscle their slim majority to change filibuster rules, despite the party’s urgent calls for action.

Alyssa Pointer / Atlanta Journal-Constitution Ann White of Roswell, Ga., protests at the state Capitol in Atlanta on Thursday against voting restrictions passed by lawmakers. President Biden called the Georgia measure an “atrocity.”