This week, Senate Democrats are pressing forward with plans to force a debate and a vote on legislation that would defend voting rights from an onslaught of conservative measures meant to curb ballot access.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is using a little-known Senate procedure to force debate on the legislation, which combines two voting rights bills that previously passed in the House: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
The final voting rights bill is still widely expected to fail in the Senate, with all Republicans opposed and conservative Democrats, including West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, refusing to bypass the filibuster to pass the legislation. That reality finds Democratic leadership — who spent 2020 promising to enact voter protections — reverting to a different tack: the “show and tell” strategy.
Democrats aren’t banking on the long shot that any senators — Democratic or Republican — will change their minds and suddenly support voting rights bills or back rule changes to pass voting rights legislation. Instead, they’re using this week’s debate to try to show voters the depths of conservative obstructionism and the GOP’s opposition to democracy. Then, they’re hoping to use that exposure to hammer voting rights legislation opponents and mount a public pressure campaign that either sways Sinema and Manchin, if and when the bill is reintroduced in the future, or inspires enough voter outrage to prevent Republicans from reclaiming the Senate in the fall.
That strategy is unlikely to move progressive activists, many of whom are demanding substantive voter protections by any means necessary.
Regardless, you can hear Democrats beginning to embrace the show-and-tell strategy as they talk about the importance of getting senators’ voting rights stances on the record.
Asked Tuesday whether Sinema and Manchin should face primary challengers in 2024 for their refusal to bypass the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., suggested this week’s debate will hold major weight.
“We’ll address that when we get past this week,” she said.
During “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., said this week’s votes are needed because “we need to know who is with us and who is not, so we will know how to conduct ourselves going forward.”
“We operate now in the blind. Let’s have these votes. Let people have this debate. And let’s see where we stand, so we will know how to conduct ourselves,” the majority whip added.
In a Sunday morning interview on CBS‘ “Face the Nation,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said senators “have to be recorded at this moment in time about where are we in protecting the right to vote.”
Schumer, who said passing the voting rights bill is an “uphill fight,” also claimed that debate over the bill will provide helpful clarity.
“We will finally have an opportunity to debate voting rights legislation, something that Republicans have thus far denied,” he said in a memo to fellow Senate Democrats last week.
“Senators can finally make clear to the American people,” he noted, “where they stand on protecting our democracy and preserving the right of every eligible American to cast a ballot.”
Democrats may be the party in power, but conservative obstruction has choked their hopes of passing critically important legislation. Now, with tempered expectations, Democrats are selling the debate on voting rights legislation as a victory on its own.
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