Time and Again We Find Progressive Laws
News Analysis
On Voting Rights, Democrats Say They Had to Go Down Swinging
Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, chose to plunge alee considering of the importance of the event fifty-fifty afterward the consequence became preordained.
WASHINGTON — In forcing a tense Senate showdown over voting rights, Senator Chuck Schumer violated a fundamental rule of congressional leadership: Don't go to the floor unless yous are sure you have the votes to win.
Mr. Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, definitely did not take the votes to win approval of his political party's voting rights packet on Wednesday. He and everyone else in the Senate knew it well before Democrats failed to break a Republican filibuster against the legislation so lost a bid to overhaul the filibuster rules when ii Democrats refused to go along.
The outcome left Democrats disappointed and distressed that they do not yet have a legislative answer to what they run across as an alarming trend of Republican-led states imposing balloting restrictions aimed at reducing participation by minority voters.
But as they assessed Wednesday'south broad-ranging fence and solid party unity on voting rights — if not on Senate process — Mr. Schumer and other Democrats said they believed they did the correct affair even though, for them, it produced the wrong result.
Their view is that Democrats could not identify the new state voting laws every bit an existential threat to democracy and make voting rights their elevation priority and then shy from holding a vote because they could non prevail.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Schumer, far from beaten down, expressed pride in the mode Democrats had handled the fight. He said Democratic senators and their allies recognized that such a battle could not be won in a single clash, but could never exist won at all if the fight was not joined.
"On civil rights, it is not linear," said Mr. Schumer, pointing to a positive response from activists who urged Democrats to go to the mat on voting rights even though they were not going to succeed. "You've got to keep fighting. And they see that the Democrats really fought for something we believed in, even if we couldn't win."
"This issue is different than any other event," said Mr. Schumer, who dismissed every bit ridiculous the criticism that Democrats should accept held off when they could not produce either 60 votes to overcome the filibuster or l votes from their caucus to unilaterally change the rules and pass the beak. "It'south the key backbone of our country — voting rights. Just information technology's too the core of our party."
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It was not always a foregone determination that Democrats would come upwardly curt.
Despite declared opposition to changing the rules from two of their political party'due south centrists, Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Democrats hoped that they could be persuaded that safeguarding the right to vote — and protecting some politically at-hazard colleagues — outweighed preserving a signature fleck of Senate process. Subsequently all, many other Democrats who had long been reluctant to tinker with the delay had changed their view considering of the voting legislation emerging in Republican-led states after the 2020 election.
But information technology was non to be. Both holdouts stuck firmly to their guns, a refusal to budge punctuated by Ms. Sinema's loud "aye" vote to uphold the rules.
Republicans remain mystified by Mr. Schumer'due south strategy. They cannot fathom why he would want to highlight the divisions betwixt almost of his caucus and Senators Manchin and Sinema, provoking grass-roots outrage at two senators he is going to need on other bug every bit Democrats effort to resurrect President Biden's stalled agenda.
They cannot empathise why he would forcefulness 47 of his members to join him on tape in support of curbing the filibuster in a losing cause, a vote that Republicans volition now try to exploit by accusing Democrats of a power grab in pursuit of progressive initiatives such equally granting statehood to the Commune of Columbia and expanding the Supreme Court.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, called the debate that ended with the delay intact perhaps the most of import twenty-four hours in Senate history. He said the vote would haunt Democrats, even though they did not succeed.
"An unprincipled attempt at grabbing power is not harmless just considering it fails," he warned Democrats. "Voting to pause the Senate is not cost-free just because a bipartisan majority of your colleagues have the wisdom to cease you."
Democrats brushed off such talk and said they found the clash cathartic. They said it yielded some benefits, including simply reminding lawmakers that the Senate is nevertheless capable of waging an intense and consequential contend. Fifty-fifty some Republicans said the daylong rhetorical battle over voting rights, which brought dozens of senators to the floor to speak, vote and engage in procedural tussling, was a refreshing change from the usual sporadic activeness and phoned-in filibusters.
"It certainly produced the closet thing we have seen to a Senate debate in 15 years," said Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon and a leading proponent of reining in the filibuster.
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Democrats said the political pressure as well brought Republicans to the table for discussions about potential changes in the administration of federal elections and the counting of presidential electoral votes to avoid a repeat of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, opening a potential path to compromise.
Mr. McConnell said once more on Thursday that Republicans would entertain changes in the Electoral Count Human activity to close loopholes that Donald J. Trump and his allies tried to utilize to overturn the election results.
"Information technology clearly is flawed," he said of the existing police. "This is directly related to what happened on Jan. 6, and nosotros ought to be able to figure out a bipartisan way to fix it."
Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a charter member of the "don't vote if you don't have the votes" club, said Mr. Schumer did the correct thing in forcing action.
"Y'all had to have the vote," she told reporters on Thursday, reflecting a view shared by progressive activists who had previously shown some frustration with Democrats.
"There was this legislative dance going on near who would vote for it and this Washington inside political game of 'Nosotros don't have the votes and we don't desire people to take a stand,'" said Marc Morial, the head of the National Urban League and a former mayor of New Orleans. "Information technology was actually important to get everyone on the record and put a marker downward."
Mr. Schumer said Democrats were even so considering their time to come voting rights approach and could break out elements of the legislation for split votes.
"While final night's vote was disappointing, it will not deter Senate Democrats from continuing our fight against voter suppression, dark money, partisan gerrymandering," he said on Thursday. "On an issue this important, not doing everything nosotros could would have been unacceptable.'"
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/politics/democrats-voting-rights.html
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