Lawmakers return to the Senate to debate Biden's doomed voting rights legislation today and make final plea to Manchin and Sinema to back the reforms
The Senate will begin debate Tuesday on voting rights legislation with no clear path forward on how to pass it into law.
With its failure all but assured, President Joe Biden is preparing to pivot his attention back to his Build Back Better legislation with a plan to pare down his social safety net bill to make it more appealing to moderate Democrats.
First up this week though is the voting rights legislation that would make Election Day a federal holiday, reform the redistricting process and tighten campaign finance laws.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer will begin debate on it Tuesday where senators will have a chance to come to the floor and speak.
The action is expected to start on Wednesday when Schumer makes a motion to end debate. That is when he'll need 60 votes in the 50-50 evenly split Senate to move the legislation forward. Given the united Republican opposition to it, that will fail.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will begin debate Tuesday on federal voting rights legislation with no clear path forward on how to pass it into law
President Joe Biden is preparing to pivot his attention back to his Build Back Better legisation with a plan to pare down his social safety net bill to make it more appealing to moderate Democrats
Schumer has then vowed to hold a vote to kill the filibuster, allowing the legislation to proceed with a simple majority.
'The only path forward on this important issue is to change the rules to bypass the filibuster,' Schumer said Monday at an event marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 'Right now there are two Democrats who don't want to make that change. But that doesn't mean the fight is over—far from it.'
However, despite a heavy public pressure campaign, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have remained firm in their resolve to support the filibuster. Without their votes, Schumer's move will fail and the legislation will die on the Senate floor.
Senate Democrats will meet Tuesday evening for one last chance to lobby Manchin and Sinema.
The pressure has been intense on the two from both party leadership and the base.
The president put all his powers of persuasion behind this effort. He went to Capitol Hill to personally lobby Manchin and Sinema. When the two stuck to their guns in favor of the filibuster, he brought them to the White House Thursday night for another round of talks.
Biden tweeted on Tuesday: 'Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s about making it harder to vote, who gets to count the vote, and whether your vote counts at all. We have to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.'
Pressure from Democratic leadership and the party base has been heavy on Senators Joe Manchin (left) and Kyrsten Sinema (right)
King's son Martin Luther King III compared Senator Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema's opposition to voting rights legislation to those who told his father to wait for a more 'convenient time' to fight segregation
Fellow Democratic lawmakers have criticized them.
'These two Democrats have decided that it is much more important to them to protect the voting rights of the minority on the Senate floor than to protect the voting rights of minorities in this great country of ours, the minorities that made it possible for them to be in the position that they're currently in,' Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina said Sunday on ABC's This Week. 'So, I hope, but I don't think, that we will change their mind.'
And Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted on Monday: 'As the voting rights bill finally comes to the floor of the Senate, there is only one vote which will really matter. Will 50 Democrats vote to override the filibuster, protect American democracy and pass the bill, or will Manchin and Sinema vote with the GOP and let the bill die?'
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, King's son tore into the two senators by name.
Martin Luther King III cited his father's famous letter from a Birmingham jail and compared the two senators to those who told his father to wait for a more 'convenient time' to fight segregation.
'While there he wrote an open letter, in which he said the biggest stumbling block was not the Ku Klux Klan, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than justice,' he said.
'He was surrounded by people who told him to wait until a more convenient time and to use more agreeable methods - 59 years later, it's the same old song and dance from Senator Manchin and Sinema.'
'History will not remember them kindly,' he said of the two senators.
This will be the fifth time the Senate will try to pass voting legislation this Congress. Democrats are trying to counter a series of state laws they say make it harder to vote, particularly for minorities and the disenfranchised. Republicans oppose federal legislation, saying elections should be handled on the state level.
Biden, meanwhile, is preparing an alternative to his $1.75 trillion Build Back Better bill that will keep climate change measures but cut down items like the child tax credit and paid family leave in the hopes appealing to Manchin, sources told Reuters.
The president needs all 50 Democrats to vote for his legislation. Manchin has raised concerns about the child tax credit and the bill's overall cost.
The Democratic senator from West Virginia announced his opposition to the bill in its current form in mid-December. Talks have been stalled since then.
'There needs to be a reset' to negotiations, one person working on the plan told Reuters. 'There's not a lot of mystery anymore about what Manchin would accept. We need to calibrate as much as possible to what he can accept, and then there needs to be a personal ask (by Biden) for his vote.'
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