WASHINGTON -- Democratic lawmakers' attempt to rewrite U.S. voting laws stalled in the Senate on Tuesday, blocked by Republican opposition to what would have been the largest overhaul of the electoral system in a generation.
The bill, known as the For the People Act, would touch on many aspects of how elections are conducted, striking down hurdles to voting while curbing the influence of money in politics and limiting partisan influence over the drawing of congressional districts.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to watch » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4SWvOyQc3U]
But many Republicans say the measure represents a federal infringement on states' authority to conduct their own elections without fraud -- and that it's meant to ultimately benefit Democrats.
The bill failed on a 50-50 vote as Republicans denied Democrats the 60 votes needed to begin debate. Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the chamber as the bill failed.
"The fight's not over," Harris said afterward.
President Joe Biden praised Senate Democrats for standing together "against the ongoing assault of voter suppression that represents a Jim Crow era in the 21st Century." He said their actions, though unsuccessful, "took the next step forward in this continuous struggle."
The rejection forces Democrats to reckon with what comes next for one of their top legislative priorities in a narrowly divided Senate. They've touted the measure as a powerful counterweight to scores of proposals advancing in GOP-controlled statehouses that would make it more difficult to vote.
"Once again, the Senate Republican minority has launched a partisan blockade of a pressing issue," Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said from the chamber floor. He vowed that the vote was the "starting gun" and not the last time voting rights would be up for debate.
Whatever Democrats decide, they likely will be confronted with the same challenge they faced Tuesday when Republicans used the filibuster to block consideration of the bill.
Republicans showed no sign of yielding.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the bill a "a solution looking for a problem" and vowed to "put an end to it."
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., called the bill "a despicable, disingenuous attempt to strip states of their constitutional right to administer elections" and said it "should never come close to reaching the president's desk."
Pressure has been mounting on Democrats to change Senate rules or watch their priorities languish. A group of moderate Democratic senators, however, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have ruled that out, denying the votes needed to make a change to the filibuster rule.
Biden has vowed what the White House calls the "fight of his presidency" over ensuring Americans' access to voting. But without changes to Senate rules, key planks of his agenda, including the voting bill, appear stalled.
Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., called Republicans' willingness to prevent debate on the voting bill a "dereliction" of duty.
"What could be more hypocritical and cynical than invoking minority rights in the Senate as a pretext for preventing debate about how to preserve minority rights in the society?" Warnock said during a floor speech Tuesday.
The changes being enacted in many Republican states are decried by voting-rights advocates who argue the restrictions will make it more difficult for people to cast ballots, particularly minority-group residents who tend to support Democrats. Republicans talk instead about fighting potential voting fraud and say the Democrats' concerns are overblown.
LATEST PROPOSALS
As the Senate discussion churns, more changes could be coming to the bill.
Democrats want to protect against intimidation at the polls in the aftermath of the 2020 election. They propose enhancing penalties for those who would threaten or intimidate election workers and creating a "buffer zone" between election workers and poll watchers, among other possible changes.
They also want to limit the ability of state officials to remove local election officials. Georgia Republicans passed a measure earlier this year that gives the GOP-dominated Legislature greater influence over a state board that regulates elections and empowers it to remove local election officials deemed to be underperforming.
Democrats are also dealing with divisions in their own party. Until Tuesday, it wasn't even clear that they would be united on the vote to bring the bill up for debate. Manchin announced earlier this month that he couldn't support the bill because it lacked Republican support.
Manchin flipped his vote to a "yes" after Democrats agreed to consider his revised version. His proposal was endorsed by former President Barack Obama and called a "step forward" by Biden's administration.
Manchin has proposed adding provisions for a national voter ID requirement, which is anathema to many Democrats, and dropping a proposed public financing of campaigns.
Those changes did little, however, to garner the bipartisan support Manchin was hoping for. Senate Republicans said they would likely reject any legislation that expands the federal government's role in elections. McConnell dismissed Manchin's version as "equally unacceptable."
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said some aspects of the Democratic bill were laudable and that she supports other voting-rights legislation, such as a reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act provisions struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.
But ultimately, she said, the "sprawling" bill amounted to "a one-size-fits-all mandate coming out of Washington, D.C.," that "in many cases doesn't work."
"It will make election more difficult, expensive, subject to federal micromanagement," Murkowski said.
"I don't think it is a tough vote," Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said Monday. "The country's been well-served by elections run by state and local officials who could respond to state and local problems."
FILIBUSTER DISPUTE
Many Democratic lawmakers and a slew of liberal activists are hoping that Tuesday's vote sparks a new push to eliminate the filibuster rule, allowing legislation to pass with a simple 51-vote majority. While the rule has been eroded in recent years -- senators voted to waive it for most nominations by presidents in 2013 and for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 -- several Democratic senators have been uneasy with the push to eliminate it entirely.
Sinema noted that Democrats used the filibuster as recently as last year in a GOP-majority Senate to block debate on a Republican-written coronavirus relief bill and federal policing overhaul. "Those filibusters were mounted not as attempts to block progress, but to force continued negotiations toward better solutions," she said.
Some Democrats question the logic of letting a congressional rule -- not a constitutional provision or a federal law -- stand in the way of a federal response to the voting bills in GOP-run states.
"This idea that we're going to value consistency over democracy, I think, has some real problems," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said. "I commend Sen. Sinema for going on the record and putting pen to paper on her beliefs. But ... let's really have an open debate about what it means to keep these rules in place."
Schumer did not lay out specific next steps after the vote Tuesday but called it "the starting gun, not the finish line." He vowed to "explore every last one of our options."
"Make no mistake about it -- it will not be the last time that voting rights comes up for a debate in the Senate," he said. "We will not let it go. We will not let it die."
Although there have been informal discussions among Democrats about potentially breaking the sprawling bill into pieces and forcing discrete votes on them, that strategy appears no more likely to succeed as long as the filibuster remains in place.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that Biden and Harris already had made significant efforts on voting rights through executive actions and the Justice Department and that they would "continue to use the bully pulpit, but also every lever in government" to move the issue forward.
"That's hardly being silent. That's hardly sitting on the backbench," Psaki said. "And he will be standing with advocates in this fight for the foreseeable future."
Information for this article was contributed by Brian Slodysko, Christina A. Cassidy and Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press; and by Mike DeBonis of The Washington Post.
