In a Georgia address on voting legislation, Vice President Kamala Harris argued that lawmakers must now pass Senate filibuster reforms, suggesting Democrats could soon lose their narrow majority.
“We do not know when we will have this opportunity again,” Harris said in Atlanta on Tuesday, in remarks urging Democratic Party senators to advance voting and elections bills. Democrats will first need to change Senate filibuster rules to pass elections reform legislation by a simple majority but lack the votes to do so.
“Today, the battle is in the hands of the leaders of the American people, in particular, that the American people sent to the United States Senate,” she said. “The American people have waited long enough. The Senate must act.”
BIDEN’S VOTING RIGHTS PUSH DWARFED BY COVID-19 AND SPENDING EFFORTS, ANGERING ACTIVISTS
Amid increased pressure, Senate Democrats set a deadline of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, or Jan. 17, to pass a voting rights bill.
It’s likely an impossible feat, with Democrats, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, on record opposing changing the Senate rules without Republican buy-in.
Activists have chafed at the administration’s lack of progress on voting rights, a task the president charged Harris with spearheading last year.
But with Harris and President Joe Biden facing low job approval numbers and as Democrats in Congress face challenging prospects in elections later this year, the White House’s room for action has slimmed.
On Tuesday, the vice president argued that Republicans had exploited “arcane” rules to block Democrats’ bills, including elections reforms.
“The Constitution of the United States gives the Congress the power to pass legislation, and nowhere, nowhere does the Constitution give a minority the right to unilaterally block legislation,” the vice president added.
Harris referenced her presidential campaign stump speech in the remarks, telling the Atlanta crowd, “Years from now, our children and our grandchildren, they will ask us about this moment. They will look back on this time, and they will ask us not about how we felt. They will ask us what did we do.”
The vice president has said before that the country will lose “role model” status around the world by failing to advance Democrats’ voting bills but on Tuesday compared the prospect to failing to counter discriminatory voting practices, including literacy tests, outlawed decades ago.
Drawing a throughline from Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Democrats’ efforts today, Harris said the public risked falling complacent to state-ruled voting laws, measures she said would stop students from easily voting, from helping disabled voters cast ballots by mail, or passing out water or food to people standing in long voting lines.
“More than 55 years ago, men, women, and children marched from Selma to Montgomery to demand the ballot. And when they arrived at the state Capitol in Alabama, Dr. King decried what he called normalcy,” she said, invoking King’s words on “the normalcy, the complacency, that was denying people the freedom to vote.”
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Democrats have focused on Georgia, in particular, in their bid to oppose voting laws imposed by Republicans, decrying these measures as unfair and unusual.
“Over the past few years, we have seen so many anti-voter laws that there is a danger of becoming accustomed to these laws,” Harris added. “Anti-voter laws are not new in our nation. But we must not be deceived into thinking they are normal.”
