In Atlanta, President Joe Biden will endorse a change to the filibuster rules to pass new voting and elections laws, leaning into a fight that the White House is seen as having no prospect of winning and where he has staked little political capital.
Tuesday’s speech marks just the second time since taking office that Biden is dedicating an event solely to voting rights, the last time being in Philadelphia remarks nearly six months ago.
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The White House has pointed to other occasions when the president has mentioned voting rights, including during his very first address to Congress when he called on lawmakers to pass Democratic legislation “and send it to my desk right away.”
“The country supports it,” Biden said at the time.
Still, the president has dedicated significantly more bandwidth to other administration priorities, including 60 events dedicated to his coronavirus response and some 40 to passing his social spending and infrastructure bills, according to an NBC News tally. Biden’s Build Back Better bill is on life support after failing to secure key Democratic backing and after signing his infrastructure bill into law last year.
The president’s failure to advocate on the voting and elections issue forcefully has so riled some Democrats that they will not attend his Georgia speech. Activists said last week he should not visit the state without a concrete plan for action.
Notably, Georgia politician Stacey Abrams will not be with the president on Tuesday, despite her advocacy on the issue. Leaving the White House for Atlanta on Tuesday, Biden said he spoke to Abrams that morning and that while the two have a great relationship, they got their schedules “mixed up.”
Some prominent allies drew a direct comparison between Biden’s efforts on infrastructure and his now-urgent call for action.
“You delivered for bridges, now deliver for voting rights,” Martin Luther King III said in a statement Wednesday. King and his wife Arndrea will attend the remarks but told MSNBC that doing so was a “difficult decision.”
“It’s been a long year of a lot of things not being done,” Arndrea King said.
Activists have called for a workable strategy, which they said the White House has failed to provide. Absent that, some argue the president should stay home.
“What we’re saying is we don’t need another speech. What we need is actually a plan,” said Cliff Albright, executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund, during a call with reporters on Monday. “What we need is for him to lean into the filibuster and do what he has not yet done, which is give a clear call for it to be modified, not just telling us what he’s open to, and not just telling us when he could possibly support if it’s necessary, but to have a full-throated call for changing the filibuster in order to pass voting rights.”
In order to pass elections reform legislation by a simple majority, Democrats will first need a change in Senate rules.
Biden is expected to advocate for this “carve-out” on Tuesday, citing “repeated obstruction” by Republicans.
“He supports — as an institutionalist — changing the Senate rules to ensure it can work again and be restored and this basic right is defended,” a White House official said ahead of the president’s remarks.
It’s a virtually impossible feat, with Democratic senators undecided on how to proceed and even opposed to many of the changes up for discussion.
“If there’s a real proposal, I’ll take a look at it and evaluate it based on what’s in the best interests of the country,” Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly told Politico this week.
But these change “almost weekly,” he added, saying that he does yet know what he would vote on.
While the Arizona senator remains undecided, this is a softer stance than Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who reiterated Tuesday that he is not going to change the Senate rules without Republican buy-in. Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has also opposed changes to the 60-vote rule.
Whether Biden will score a political reward from the Democratic base at the end of this remains unclear.
A narrow bipartisan voting rights initiative is underway, notably around an update of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to clarify the role played by the vice president and Congress in certifying presidential elections.
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However, the White House has said it is unwilling to support this and remains focused on the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
“There is no substitute. Period,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said of the bills.
