WASHINGTON (CN) — The Senate started debate Tuesday on voting rights legislation that would enshrine a key pillar of the Democrats' platform, but one that is all but doomed by insufficient votes to overcome Republican opposition.
Uniform mail-in and early voting rules throughout the country are a few of the changes that the package contemplates. others include making Election Day a federal holiday, ending partisan gerrymandering, and reinstating a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that requires federal oversight of changes to voting laws in states with a history of racial discrimination.
To circumvent a filibuster in the Senate on whether lawmakers would even consider and debate the bill, Democrats took an unrelated NASA bill that had already passed the Senate and tacked on as amendments two voting rights proposals: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.
The Senate canceled a planned recess scheduled for this week to consider the legislation, but a filibuster showdown is still likely to ensue over whether to end debate and vote on final passage of the bill.
Democrats don't have the 60 votes needed to end this filibuster, an obstruction that is expected to kill the legislation. “The eyes of the nation will be watching what happens this week in the United States Senate," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday on the floor of the Senate.
Schumer has proposed changes to the Senate rules and filibuster as a means of pushing through the bill, but all party members need to be on board for such a reform to succeed, a coalition that does not currently exist.
Democratic Senators Krysten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia have both said they support the underlying legislation but oppose changing the chamber's rules to get it passed.
Sinema stood on the Senate floor last week, vigorously reiterating her refusal to alter or carve out the filibuster while party leaders and even the president pushed for party unity.
"I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country," Sinema said on Thursday.
This opposition from Sinema and Manchin has frustrated fellow members of the Democratic Party who argue democracy and civil rights are under siege as GOP-led state legislatures pass state laws limiting how and when people can vote.
"These laws are clearly intended to target voters of color and make it harder to vote. Period. Our country’s history of racial discrimination in voting is undeniable and it’s undeniable that we are witnessing history repeat itself," Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, said on the Senate floor Tuesday.
Despite a lack of party unity and the legislation's chances at passage looking grim, Schumer said he is committed to holding a vote on the legislation and, if necessary, changes to the Senate's rules.
"When this chamber confronts a question this important, one so vital to our country, so vital to our ideals, so vital to the future of our democracy, you don’t slide it off the table and say 'Never mind,'" the New York Democrat said. "Win, lose, or draw, members of this chamber were elected to debate and to vote, especially on an issue as vital to the beating heart of our democracy as voting rights."
If Republicans filibuster the voting rights legislation, as they are expected to later this week, Schumer said the Senate "must consider and vote on the rules changes that are appropriate and necessary to restore the Senate and make voting legislation possible."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, said that Democrats have painted the filibuster as an obstacle in need of reform to pass voting rights, but Democrats used it last week to tank a bill that would have sanctioned Russia over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
"Last week they literally wielded the 60-vote threshold themselves. A useful reminder of just how fake, fake, the hysteria has been,” McConnell said.
McConnell and a slew of Republicans expressed opposition Tuesday to both the threats to scrap the filibuster and the legislation itself, labeling it as an unnecessary encroachment on states' autonomy.
"Senate Democrats want to mar their own legacies with a reckless procedural vote they know will fail," McConnell said. "A faction this desperate for unlimited short-term power is a faction that must be denied it."
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