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Sinema Rejects Changing Filibuster, Dealing Biden a Setback - The New York Times

Sinema Rejects Changing Filibuster, Dealing Biden a Setback - The New York Times

Sinema Rejects Changing Filibuster, Dealing Biden a Setback - The New York Times
Jan 14, 2022 3 mins, 35 secs

Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s comments came after the House approved a set of voting rights measures on a party-line vote of 220 to 203.

WASHINGTON — President Biden’s campaign to push new voting rights protections through Congress appeared all but dead on Thursday, after it became clear that he had failed to unite his own party behind his drive to overhaul Senate rules to enact the legislation over Republican opposition.

Biden, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, stunned her colleagues just hours before the president was slated to make his case to them in person at the Capitol by taking the Senate floor to declare that she would not support undermining the filibuster to pass legislation under any circumstances.

Biden and Democrats without an avenue for winning enactment of the voting rights measures, which they have characterized as vital to preserve democracy in the face of a Republican-led drive in states around the country to limit access to the ballot box.

It came two days after the president had put his reputation on the line to make the case for enacting the legislation by any means necessary — including scrapping the famed filibuster — with a major speech in Atlanta that compared opponents of the voting rights measures to racist figures of the Civil War era and segregationists who thwarted civil rights initiatives in the 1960s.

Biden would do next, given that Republicans are all but certain to use a filibuster a fifth time to block the voting rights measures, and that Democrats lack the unanimous support needed in their party to change the rules to enable them to muscle the bills through themselves.

Biden said after emerging empty-handed from his session with Senate Democrats.

Sinema reiterated his opposition on Thursday to doing away with the filibuster to push through the voting rights legislation.

Manchin at the White House on Thursday night to discuss the voting rights measures, though neither of them had appeared to leave room in their statements for compromising on Senate rules.

Manchin had stated repeatedly that they would not use the bare 50-vote Democratic majority to weaken the filibuster, the procedural weapon that effectively requires 60 votes to move forward on major legislation, which they argue is fundamental to the nature of the Senate.

Sinema said that while she backed the voting rights legislation her party is pushing and was alarmed about voting restrictions being enacted by Republicans in some states, she believed that a partisan change in the filibuster would only fuel already rampant political division.

Biden addressed Democrats, with lawmakers resolute about the voting rights issue but resigned to the bind that Ms.

In 2020, as a result of the pandemic, millions embraced voting early in person or by mail, especially among Democrats.

Broadly, the party is taking a two-pronged approach: imposing additional restrictions on voting (especially mail voting), and giving G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures greater control over the mechanics of casting and counting ballots.

In Congress, Democrats have focused their efforts on two sweeping bills that protect access to voting and clarify how to count electoral votes, but Republicans in the 50-50 Senate have blocked both.

Some of the most significant legislation was enacted in battleground states like Texas, Georgia and Florida. Republican lawmakers are planning a new wave of election laws in 2022.

Byrd had been willing to support changes in Senate rules, but had done so in a consensus fashion.

Sinema’s speech was a devastating development for Democrats, who just hours earlier on Thursday had begun an intricate process to speed a voting rights showdown.

The new legislation combined two separate bills already passed by the House — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — and joined them in what had been an unrelated measure covering NASA.

They argued that the flurry of new state laws was clearly intended to reduce voting in minority communities, amounting to a contemporary version of the kinds of restrictions that were prevalent before the enactment of landmark civil rights laws in the 1960s.

It is a narrower version of legislation that Democrats introduced early last year but revised to suit Mr

A second measure named for Representative John Lewis, the civil rights icon and former congressman who died in 2020, would restore parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act weakened by Supreme Court rulings

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