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President Biden will implore the Senate Tuesday afternoon to change its filibuster rule and allow the chamber to take up sweeping election reform legislation, saying it’s a matter of choosing “democracy over autocracy.”
Biden will travel to Atlanta with Vice President Kamala Harris and other members of his administration, Democratic senators and civil and voting rights advocates to rally support for measures intended to counter laws enacted by Republican-led states that critics say make it harder to vote.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has set a deadline of next Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to either pass the two bills in question or change the legislative filibuster, which requires 60 votes to advance most proposals.
“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation,” Biden will say, according to speech excerpts released by the White House. “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice?”
“I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch,” Biden will add. “I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And so the question is, where will the institution of the United States Senate stand?”
The language builds on a fiery speech Biden delivered last week on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, in which he said the pro-Trump protesters who tried to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election “held a dagger at the throat of America.”
In those remarks, the president also blasted his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, for his “lies about this election” and said the mob that stormed the Capitol wanted to “ruin what our country fought for at Lexington and Concord, at Gettysburg and Omaha Beach, Seneca Falls, Selma, Alabama.”
However, some voting rights advocates planned to boycott Tuesday’s speech to protest what they see as the administration’s inaction.
“We’re beyond speeches. At this point, what we need, what we are demanding, is federal legislation,” said La Tosha Brown, co-founder of Black Votes Matter.
Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the group, said he and other advocates have urged Biden to remain in DC to lean on his former Senate colleagues.
“We don’t need even more photo ops. We need action, and that action is in the form of the John Lewis Voting Rights (Advancement) Act as well as the Freedom to Vote Act, and we need that immediately,” he said.
Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who has been credited with boosting minority voter turnout in sufficient numbers to elect Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the US Senate last year, also will not attend Tuesday’s speech due to what her aides described as a scheduling conflict.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki offered a preview of Biden’s remarks at Monday’s briefing, saying the president would “forcefully advocate for protecting the most bedrock American right: the right to vote and have your voice counted in a free, fair, and secure election that is not tainted by partisan manipulation.”
Psaki added that Biden will make the case that the country is at a crucial point and will focus on “what the changes have meant in states like Georgia and across the country, what is at stake for voters in Georgia and other states across the country, and why this is so imperative it move forward.”
But the way forward to change the filibuster faces opposition from moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, who have said they want to preserve the 60-vote threshold to ensure bipartisanship.
“All my discussions have been bipartisan, with Republicans and Democrats,” Manchin told reporters last month. “A rules change should be done to where we all have input in this rules change, because we’re all going to have to live with it. Because we’ll be in the minority sometime and then in the majority, back and forth.”
Schumer, in a recent letter to his Democratic colleagues, said preserving the right to vote was of immense importance.
“The fight for the ballot is as old as the Republic,” Schumer wrote. “Over the coming weeks, the Senate will once again consider how to perfect this union and confront the historic challenges facing our democracy.”
With Post wires
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