Days after a sweeping Democratic voting reform bill collapsed in the Senate, President Joe Biden slammed Republican-backed bills he contends would allow state legislatures to nullify election results and said he intends to travel the country to advocate for voting rights.
Speaking at the White House on Thursday, Biden said a slew of GOP-led reform bills were about more than mandating voter ID or barring people from providing water to voters waiting in line. “This is about who gets to judge whether your vote counted after it’s been cast,” the president said. He called the issue “maybe the most consequential” facing the country.
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Biden had tasked Vice President Kamala Harris with shepherding a major election and voting overhaul bill through Congress, the For the People Act, before it collapsed in the Senate on Tuesday. The vote fell along party lines, 50-50 in the evenly split Senate, but it needed 60 votes to advance.
Advocates and Democratic lawmakers had branded this a must-pass bill essential to countering new state election laws passed by GOP-led legislatures.
Biden slammed this effort by his political opponents on Thursday, saying that it “borders on being immoral.”
“[What] these guys are trying to do now, in rough approximation, is say that if we don’t like the way the vote turned out, and we control the state legislature, we’re gonna say the vote didn’t count,” Biden said. “It’s wrong. … Your vote has to count when you cast it.”
“This is the sacred right to vote,” Biden said. “I’m going to make it a case across the country.”
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Biden made the comments after delivering remarks on a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure deal reached earlier in the day. He said that to move forward, however, a reconciliation bill with other Democratic priorities would need to advance, too.
“If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” the president said.
