Democrats, lacking the votes to pass partisan legislation overhauling federal elections, are citing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol to aid their effort.
House and Senate Democrats, as well as President Joe Biden, will gather at the Capitol on Thursday to remember last year’s attack by a throng of violent protesters opposed to Biden’s presidential victory.
The day won’t focus only on the one-year anniversary of the attack, however.
Democrats are using the anniversary to fuel their push to get voting legislation signed into law that would stop new red-state voter integrity measures, including a requirement to show identification in order to cast a ballot and the elimination of ballot harvesting.
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“There is no better way to heal the damage of Jan. 6 than to act so that our constitutional order is preserved for the future,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat. “We must do so by any means that we can, even if it means Democrats find alternate paths forward on our own.”
Republicans, who plan to leave town Thursday to attend the funeral of the late Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, recoiled at the effort to tie Jan. 6 to the Democrats’ voting legislation.
“It is beyond distasteful for some of our colleagues to ham-fistedly invoke the Jan. 6 anniversary to advance these aims,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday.
Democrats this month were forced to abandon plans to pass Biden’s massive social welfare and climate spending plan, the Build Back Better Act, thanks to opposition from centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Party lawmakers instead pivoted to so-called voting rights legislation, which they argue is needed to combat red-state voter integrity laws they say will restrict access to the polls. They’ve been trying to pass voter overhaul legislation for months, but Republicans have blocked the legislation through the filibuster.
Democrats are now working to coerce Manchin and fellow centrist holdout Sen. Kyrsten Sinema to change the upper chamber’s rules and eliminate the filibuster, ending a longstanding 60-vote requirement to pass legislation.
Schumer has vehemently opposed eliminating the legislative filibuster in the past, arguing it would turn the nation into “a banana republic.”
But he now says the voting measures Democrats hope to pass would “protect our democracy from subversion and safeguard the right to vote. ” Schumer said the measure would somehow prevent a repeat of the Capitol riot, which began after then-President Donald Trump’s rally contesting the election results.
So far, Democrats have not won the support of either Manchin or Sinema in their quest to eliminate the filibuster and pass the voting legislation.
One of the bills is co-authored by Manchin. It would weaken voter ID laws and take steps to federalize elections, among other changes. A second measure, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, would reinstate a requirement that certain states seek federal approval before changing election laws or changing district boundary lines.
The Supreme Court struck down the requirement in 2013.
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Republicans oppose the legislation, arguing it would rob localities of control over their own elections, weaken voter integrity measures, and ultimately favor Democratic candidates.
They have urged Democrats to maintain the filibuster, as the GOP majority did, despite pressure from their conservative base.
“The fact that violent criminals broke the law does not entitle Senate Democrats to break the Senate,” said McConnell, a Kentucky Republican.
