Senate Democrats take ballot access campaign on the road
ATLANTA — Senate Democrats took their campaign for farreaching federal voting rights legislation to Georgia on Monday, convening a rare hearing in a state at the center of a national fight over elections.
At a field hearing of the Senate Rules Committee in Atlanta, lawmakers and voters decried the restrictive new voting law signed this spring by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, as an attempt to disenfranchise Black and young voters and consolidate Republicans' tenuous grip on power.
“There is much talk about not being able to give food and water to voters on line, but the actual law is much more abhorrent than that,” said Rep. Billy Mitchell, chairman of the Georgia House Democratic caucus. “What I am most concerned about — and hope you come up with a solution for — is cheating umpires that these laws are creating.”
But the hearing’s real aim is to sway a debate more than 500 miles away in Washington, where Democrats are trying to revive a stalled elections overhaul in the Senate to make it easier to vote and offset many of the changes that Republicans have pushed through in states like Georgia.
An initial attempt by Democrats to debate their overhaul, the For the People Act, failed in the Senate last month in the face of unified Republican opposition. Now, Democrats are trying to retool, but it is unclear if their chances of success will improve as long as key moderate senators refuse to alter the Senate’s filibuster rule, which in effect gives Republicans veto power over their agenda.
Party leaders are working with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the most outspoken Democratic opponent of the measure, to draft a narrower compromise bill, which could come up for another vote in August or the fall. They are also readying additional legislation, named after the late civil rights icon John Lewis of Georgia, to strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Given the likelihood that both those efforts would fail amid Republican opposition, Democrats have begun work to try to include more modest voting rights measures in the party’s $3.5 trillion budget blueprint, which they are seeking to pass on a simple majority vote.