Voting rights bill passes, but faces Senate filibuster
WASHINGTON — The House voted Tuesday to restore federal oversight of state election laws under the 1965 Voting Rights Act and expand its reach, as Democrats moved to strengthen a crowning legislative achievement of the civil rights era amid a renewed national fight over access to the ballot box.
The legislation, named after Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, who died last year, is a linchpin of the party’s strategy to combat voting restrictions in Republican-led states. It would reverse two Supreme Court rulings that gutted the statute, reviving the power of the Justice Department to bar some discriminatory election changes from taking effect and easing the path to challenge others in court.
Democrats voted along party lines to adopt the bill 219-212 in a rare August session just days after it was introduced. But stiff Republican opposition awaits in the Senate, where a likely filibuster threatens to sink it before it can reach President Biden’s desk.
That outcome is becoming familiar this summer, as Democrats on Capitol Hill try to use their party’s control of Congress and the White House to lock in watershed election changes — only to be blocked by their Republican counterparts. In the meantime, more than a dozen GOPled states have already enacted more than 30 laws this year making it harder to vote.
Frustration with that dynamic has fueled increasingly desperate calls from progressives and many mainstream Democrats to invoke the socalled “nuclear option” and eliminate the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. Doing so would allow Democrats to move unilaterally without Republican support, but any rules change would require support from all 50 Democrats in the chamber, and key moderates are opposed.
Proponents of the bill framed it as a vital complement to Democrats’ other major elections bill, the For the People Act, which has stalled in the Senate amid a Republican filibuster. That legislation would set new national standards making it easier to vote, end partisan gerrymandering and combat dark money.
Republicans argued that Democrats were ignoring the nation’s racial progress as justification to allow the federal government to run roughshod over the states and rewrite election rules in a
way that would benefit their political candidates.
A group of eight senators is working on a compromise that could be considered in place of the For the People Act, though it is unclear if even that could attract enough Republican support.
Despite the demands from progressive groups to carve out an exception to the filibuster if it becomes an obstacle to voting rights legislation, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democratic moderate, said he would not support an exemption.
Civil-rights leaders Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III are leading a march on Saturday in Washington to demand that Congress pass both voting rights laws. More than 100 progressive and civil rights groups will participate including the Drum Major Institute, Sharpton’s National Action Network, March On and 51 for 51.