Biden vows to protect right to vote from GOP limits
Speaking at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday, President Biden called the efforts to curtail voting accessibility “un-American” and “un-democratic” and launched a broadside against his predecessor, Donald Trump, who baselessly alleged misconduct in the 2020 election after his defeat.
WASHINGTON — President Biden on Tuesday decried new Republican-backed state laws restricting voting rights, calling them “unconscionable” attempts to “deny the will of the people” — primarily, people of color — and “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”
The remarks, the president’s most forceful on the subject to date, served as a rebuke to Republicans in the states and Congress, a rallying cry for Democrats ahead of next year’s midterm election and a wake-up call to the country generally.
“There’s an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote and free and fair elections — an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are, who we are as Americans,” he said in a speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a venue chosen for its symbolic value.
“I am not saying this to alarm you,” he continued, speaking directly to the audience. “You should be alarmed.”
He said the Republicans’ actions on voting access and rights are based entirely on former President Trump’s “big lie” that he lost the 2020 election to Biden because of rampant fraud.
“‘The big lie’ is just that, a big lie,” Biden said, calling the election “the most scrutinized” in American history. He took aim at Trump without naming him: “In America, if you lose, you accept the results, you follow the Constitution. You don’t call facts fake and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy. That’s not statesmanship, that’s selfishness.”
But while Biden vowed to “vigorously” challenge any efforts to in effect disenfranchise voters — efforts he called a “21st century Jim Crow assault” — he was blunt about the dim prospects in a deeply polarized Congress for Democrats’ proposed legislation to counter the Republicans’ state statutes by strengthening federal voting rights laws.
“Legislation is one tool but not the only tool,” he said. Those steps he outlined were limited, however, consisting mainly of using his bully pulpit and relying on Democrats’ election-season outreach to inform voters about their states’ new restrictions on access to voting.
The president blasted Republican attempts to limit ballot access and, in some states, to allow partisan officials more latitude to throw out ballots or to overturn the results reported by nonpartisan election administrators. Voter suppression, along with election subversion, presents “the most dangerous threat to voting and free and fair elections in our history,” he said.
Raising his voice at one point, Biden spoke as if directly addressing Republicans: “Have you no shame?” He went on: “Will you deny the will of the people? Will you ignore their voices? We have to ask: Are you on the side of truth or lies?”
Pennsylvania Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, one of only a few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for sparking the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection with his lies about the election, focused his response on the less controversial elements of some GOP election proposals, criticizing Biden’s blanket characterization as too harsh.
“Suggesting that election integrity measures such as voter ID and prohibitions on ballot harvesting are reminiscent of Jim Crow is false, offensive, and trivializes a dark period of actual systemic racism in parts of America,” Toomey said in a statement.
Despite Biden’s muscular rhetoric, many activists in the party’s base remained chagrined at his unwillingness to embrace their calls for the Democratic-controlled Senate to scrap the filibuster rule, which in effect requires a supermajority of 60 votes to take up most legislation and is the primary impediment to voting rights legislation and other Democratic priorities. Biden did not mention the filibuster issue or the moderate Democratic senators who oppose changing the rule.
Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible, tweeted after Biden’s speech: “This was a pathetic pile of political pablum, not the launch of a campaign to save our democracy. You can’t win the fight if you refuse to even NAME the main obstacle to winning.”
However, the House majority whip, Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), suggested in an interview Monday that Biden could be discussing the issue privately with key Democrats and leaving the door open for supporting a move against the filibuster later.
“I just don’t think you negotiate these kind of issues from the microphone,” said Clyburn, a close Biden ally. “You do it much better from the telephone.”
The Senate, which is evenly divided, failed to advance a sweeping voting rights bill last month after all 50 Republicans voted against bringing it to the floor for debate. The For the People Act, which the House passed in March, proposed a federal law to establish automatic voter registration, expand early voting, ensure more transparency in reporting political donations and limit partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, among other provisions.
Biden called the legislation “a national imperative.” He also expressed support for a second proposal to create the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which proposes narrower changes and could receive a vote in Congress before the end of the year.
President Biden is under pressure from progressives to do more on voting rights as Texas Democratic legislators flee state. He has few options other than the bully pulpit.
The speech came as about 50 Democratic state lawmakers from Texas were in Washington to lobby for action, having fled Austin, the state capital, on Monday in a dramatic attempt to block another GOP-backed elections bill, by denying Republicans the quorum required for a vote.
The Texas Democrats similarly boycotted the Legislature in late May, but this walkout was their first outside the state — to avoid any attempt to force their return to the state Capitol. The Texas Democrats are determined to thwart the Republican legislation to restrict voter access, bar 24-hour polling places and ballot drop boxes, and empower partisan poll watchers.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who is overseeing the administration efforts on voting rights, met many of the Texas lawmakers Tuesday afternoon on Capitol Hill. “You are fighters,” she told them at a union office, equating their walkout to civil rights battles from past eras. “Defending the right to vote is as American as apple pie,” she said.
Biden has no plans to meet the lawmakers, who risk arrest in Texas, but he “praised their courage,” according to Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
Democrats are set to consider two voting-rights bills: the sweeping For the People Act and the narrower John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
Progressive activists continue to pressure the administration to throw its weight behind curbing the Senate filibuster over the opposition of Republicans led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as well as some Democrats.
MoveOn Executive Director Rahna Epting, calling the Republican strategy “a five-alarm fire,” said, “The right to vote — the cornerstone of our democracy — must not be subject to Mitch McConnell’s political obstruction. Arcane and outdated Senate procedures and norms are not more important than our constitutional rights.”
In Pennsylvania, several Democrats vying for the party’s Senate nomination made their opposition to the filibuster clear, including John Fetterman, the lieutenant governor, and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta.
“President Biden wouldn’t need to come to Philadelphia today and give a speech on voting rights if Democrats in D.C. started to vote like actual Democrats,” Fetterman said. “It is time for the Senate to abolish the filibuster and pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.”
On Tuesday, the Declaration for American Democracy coalition, which includes more than 200 advocacy organizations on the left, issued a statement evoking the legacy of former Rep. Lewis, the late civil rights icon who was savagely beaten by police officers during the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.
Jana Morgan, the group’s director, urged Biden to “act with urgency and do whatever is necessary to immediately pass the For the People Act, including changing the Jim Crow filibuster, to protect each American’s right to vote.”
Times staff writer Janet Hook contributed to this report.
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