Joe Biden Isn’t Treating Voting Rights Like the Emergency It Is

It was only six months into Joe Biden’s presidency, but fears that he and the Democrats were running out of time to act on voting rights were already reaching a fever pitch. Since the election, Republicans had been working relentlessly to translate Donald Trump’s addled lies into voter suppression laws, with an alarming degree of success. And what were the Democrats doing to stop them? Bickering with Joe Manchin over whether or not he could, as he claimed, get 10 GOP senators to back the kind of voter protections their party was dead-set on rolling back. People were getting frustrated. So Biden, who was still in his honeymoon phase, set out to assure the base, condemn the Republicans’ underhanded game, and push his party to move on the issue.

“Time and again, we’ve weathered threats to the right to vote in free and fair elections,” Biden said in a July speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. “And each time, we found a way to overcome. And that’s what we must do today.”

Three months hence, Democrats are still searching. Their latest effort, a compromise bill for which Manchin seemed to think he could get GOP support, was easily defeated Wednesday by the filibuster, which Mitch McConnell gleefully deployed with all the vainglory he could muster. “As long as Senate Democrats remain fixated on their radical agenda,” the minority leader said, “this body will continue to do the job the framers assigned it and stop terrible ideas in their tracks.” Where does that leave Democrats and others concerned about democracy? Who knows. The For the People Act and the reauthorization of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act aren’t going anywhere, thanks to the filibuster Manchin doesn’t want to change even a little and to the fact that all GOP lawmakers, including anti-Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, stand to reap political profit from the former president’s lies and support the suppressive laws that were borne of his bogus claims. The same obstacles also stand in the way of the pared-down legislation Manchin preferred, as demonstrated Wednesday when Democrats couldn’t even win a vote to open up debate on the bill. What, exactly, are they supposed to do now, with only a year to go until the midterms?

Senator Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, suggested there was at least some silver lining to Wednesday’s vote. “The next steps are unclear,” he told Politico, “but the first step was to get the Democrats unified on the voting rights bill.” However, Democrats were always unified on voting rights, at least in the broad strokes. Where they’ve been divided is over how to move it forward, and without an agreement there, it won’t matter if they are in lockstep on the legislation; in a 50-50 Senate, with Republicans pinning their electoral prospects to voter suppression, there is not a damn thing Democrats can accomplish on this issue legislatively with the filibuster in place. Not a sweeping reform like the For the People Act. Not a scaled down plan like the Freedom to Vote Act that failed Wednesday. Nothing.

Naturally, that means Democrats are turning back to Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to beg them to consider at least tweaking the filibuster to allow legislation like this—protections vitals to the health of American democracy—to get through the GOP blockade. “We will circle back with all of our colleagues to plead with them to make the changes necessary to pass this bill,” Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen told the New York Times. But those appeals have gone absolutely nowhere in the past, and Manchin and Sinema may be too busy blocking their party’s infrastructure plans to give them the time of the day on a voting rights carve-out in the filibuster. This is not to say it’s impossible Manchin and Sinema will come around; the dysfunction has already inspired other lawmakers to reconsider their opposition to rule changes. “In the end, it is going to come down to getting Republicans or restoring order,” Montana Democrat Jon Tester, a moderate, told the Times. The trouble is, Manchin and Sinema may not see McConnell’s stonewalling as a symptom of a broken Senate; with a political vision in which being a “moderate” means to ensure that nothing substantial ever gets done, Manchin and Sinema likely view this endless game of obstruction as the Senate working just as intended. Chuck Schumer, to this point, hasn’t been able to convince them otherwise. Neither, of course, has Bernie Sanders. Might Biden?

Maybe not—but activists would certainly prefer he do more, and with a little more urgency. In that July speech, Biden described the Republican attack as the “most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.” When I spoke to civil rights leaders the following month, they were sounding the alarm. “The sense of urgency, along with priority, needs to escalate,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding: “We cannot out-organize voter suppression.”

So far, the Biden administration’s response to the GOP assault on voting rights hasn’t matched the president’s urgent rhetoric. This isn’t to say the president has done nothing, or that the attention he’s devoted to other matters—infrastructure, the climate crisis, the pandemic—is unwarranted. But has the administration acted like this is the existential threat to democracy that they say it is? “He’s made clear that he supports voting reform, but that is simply not enough,” Johnson told Politico. “We need him to bring this over the finish line.”