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One of Washington’s most powerful Democrats issued a blunt warning to members of his own party, saying they had to find a way to pass major voting rights legislation or they would lose control of Congress.
The comments from Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, came days after the House of Representatives approved a franchise bill that would enact some of the most dramatic extensions of the franchise since the United States. Voting Rights Act 1965. Even though Democrats also control the U.S. Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass in the House due to a procedural rule, filibuster, which requires 60 votes to move legislation forward.
In an interview with the Guardian this week, Clyburn called two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who opposed getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans across the country are pushing sweeping steps to cut voting rights and letting expansive voting rights legislation die would hurt Democrats, Clyburn said.
“There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 we’re going to allow filibuster to be used to deny the right to vote. It will not arrive. It would be catastrophic, ”he said. “If Manchin and Sinema like to be in the majority, they had better find a way around the filibuster on voting and civil rights.”
Clyburn issued this warning before the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when law enforcement brutally beat up voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama.
Clyburn and other House Democrats hoped the early days of Joe Biden’s administration would be marked by the passage of a bill named after the late Georgia MP John Lewis, a civil rights hero who has almost got killed on Bloody Sunday. The move would reinstate a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013, that required places with a history of electoral discrimination to obtain federal government approval of electoral amendments before they are passed. ‘come into force.
“Here we are talking about the voting rights law he worked so hard for named in his honor and they are going to filibuster to death?” It won’t happen, ”Clyburn said.
But the likelihood of this bill becoming law is questionable under current proceedings. Democrats expect Republicans to find a reason to filibuster after his expected stint in the House of Representatives and Senate review. Clyburn therefore calls for some sort of circumvention of filibuster in the current legislative climate, in which the Senate is split 50 to 50 and the use of the legislative obstruction mechanism is all too common.
“I’m not going to say you have to get rid of the filibuster. I would say you would do well to develop a Manchin-Sinema rule to bypass the filibuster when it comes to race and civil rights, ”Clyburn said.
Clyburn said he did not discuss the filibuster modification with Biden, who has expressed support for maintaining the filibuster.
The reality of their slim majority and the regularity of the dying legislation due to filibuster has led Democrats to choose to push the Biden administration’s Covid relief package through a budget process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the 60-vote filibuster threshold. Clyburn wants to see the same with civil rights.
“You can’t obstruct the budget,” Clyburn said. “That’s why we have rules of reconciliation. We have to reconcile civil rights and voting rights. It should have had reconciliation clearance a long, long time ago. “
He noted: “If the headlines read that John R. Lewis’s Voting Rights Act was obstructed to death, that would be catastrophic.”
Clyburn’s comments highlight the difficulty for the federal government to bring forward a bill due to obscure legislative hurdles. Widely popular proposals like an increase in the minimum wage or a bill on the right to vote seem dead on arrival. And that has left seasoned Senate Democrats skeptical that even a bill protecting Americans’ suffrage stands a chance. First, the systematic obstruction should go away, and that seems unlikely at this time.
“The short-term prospects of removing the filibuster seem distant simply because there is no voice to do it,” said Luke Albee, former chief of staff to Democratic Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Pat Leahy from Vermont. “My instinct is that it will take six months, eight months, a year of total obstructionism on the Republican side for the senators who are now skeptical of getting rid of the filibuster to at least have a more open mind about it. . “
Albee also said it was possible that a voting rights law could face strong Republican opposition, despite Clyburn’s trust.
“There’s no one who hopes this goes over more than me, but I’m just worried it’s a toxic environment,” Albee added.
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