President Joe Biden singled out Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, though not by name, for thwarting their party’s efforts to push election and voting reforms through Congress while recalling a race riot during a visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” he said Tuesday.
West Virginia’s Manchin and Arizona’s Sinema are two critical centrist votes as Democrats cling to power in the evenly divided Senate. But most legislation, including potential election and voting reforms, requires the support of 60 senators to avoid a filibuster and clear the chamber. Both Manchin and Sinema do not back nixing the filibuster rules.
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Biden promised his administration would ramp up its efforts to counter the “unprecedented assault” on voting as Republican-governed states shore up their election security laws after the 2020 election’s reliance on mail-in ballots.
In the meantime, Biden announced Vice President Kamala Harris would be spearheading the voting rights campaign. That adds the issue to her portfolio, which so far includes addressing the root causes of illegal migration across the southern border from the Northern Triangle, improving broadband access, and chairing the National Space Council.
“June should be a month of action on Capitol Hill,” Biden said of voting rights advocacy.
Biden became the first president on Tuesday to visit Tulsa to commemorate the massacre of 1921. An estimated 300 black residents are believed to have been killed by the city’s white residents in a ground and aerial assault of its Greenwood District 100 years ago. Two days of violence erupted in what was once described as “Black Wall Street” after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black man, was accused of assaulting 17-year-old Sarah Page, a white girl.
For Biden, the Tulsa unrest was an act of “hate and domestic terrorism with a throughline that exists today.” He referenced the 2017 race-related protests and counterprotests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Jan. 6 sacking of Capitol Hill.
“Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today. Not ISIS, white supremacists,” Biden said, pledging to “soon lay out a broader strategy to counter domestic terrorism and the most violent forms of bigotry.”
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House Democrats passed H.R. 1, dubbed the For the People Act, in March, a bill that overhauls elections with measures for public financing and automatic voter registration. Manchin has not endorsed S.1, H.R. 1’s companion legislation in the Senate, but said he would vote for the John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, or H.R. 4.
