One of the most powerful Democrats in Washington issued an honest warning to members of his own party, saying that they must find a way to pass the most important legislation on voting rights, otherwise they will lose control of Congress.
The remarks of Jim Clyburn, the House’s majority whip, came days after the House of Representatives passed a comprehensive suffrage bill that would enact some of the most dramatic extensions of voting rights since the 1965 suffrage law. Although the Democrats also control the U.S. Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass the House because of a procedural rule, the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to advance legislation.
In an interview with the Guardian this week, Clyburn has called on two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Cinema, who are opposed to getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans across the country are taking comprehensive measures to restrict the right to vote and extend the extension of voting rights legislation would hurt Democrats, Clyburn said.
‘There is no way in 2021 to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. It’s just not going to happen. It would be catastrophic, “he said. “If Manchin and Cinema like to be in the majority, they better find a way around the filibuster when it comes to voting rights and civil rights.”
Clyburn issued warning ahead of time the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when law enforcement brutally beat voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama.
Clyburn and other House Democrats hoped the early days of Joe Biden’s government would be marked by the passage of a bill named after late Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights hero nearly killed on Bloody Sunday. That measure would restore an important provision of the Voting Rights Act, repealed by the Supreme Court in 2013, which required places with a history of voting discrimination to have election changes cleared by the federal government before it went into effect.
‘Here we are talking about the Voting Rights Act for which he worked so hard and which is mentioned in his honor and that they will filter it to death? That’s not going to happen, ”Clyburn said.
But the likelihood of the bill becoming legal is questionable under current procedures. Democrats expect Republicans will find a reason to filter it after the expected passage through the House of Representatives and consideration in the Senate. Clyburn therefore calls for a kind of solution to the filibuster in the current legislative climate, in which the Senate is divided into 50-50 and the use of the legislative impediment mechanism is all too common.
‘I’m not going to say you have to get rid of the filibuster. “I would say you would do well to develop a Manchin Cinema rule on getting away from the filibuster, as far as racial and civil rights are concerned,” Clyburn said.
Clyburn said he did not discuss changing the filibuster with Biden, who expressed support for keeping the filibuster in place.
The reality of their slim majority and the regularity of legislation dying by filibuster led Democrats to choose to pass Biden’s Ciden aid package through a budget process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the filibuster-stable threshold of 60 votes. Clyburn wants to see the same with civil rights.
“You can not filibuster the budget,” Clyburn said. “That is why we have rules of reconciliation. We must have civil and suffrage reconciliation. It must have had conciliation permission long, long ago. ”
He noted: “If the headlines read that the John R Lewis suffrage law was killed, it would be catastrophic.”
Clyburn’s comments highlight the difficulty the federal government has in enacting a bill due to mandatory legal barriers. General proposals such as a minimum wage increase or a voting rights bill look dead on arrival. And that has left veteran Senate Democrats skeptical that even a bill that protects Americans’ voting rights has a chance. First, the filibuster would have to go, and that seems unlikely at the moment.
“The short-term prospects of doing away with the filibuster seem far-fetched just because there are not the votes to do so,” said Luke Albee, a former chief of staff to Democratic Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Pat Leahy of Vermont. , said. “My gut is that it will take six months, eight months, a year of total obstruction on the part of the Republican side for senators who are now skeptical of getting rid of the filibuster, to at least have a more open mind about it. “
Albee also said that it is possible that a strong Republican opposition could stand against a law on voting rights, despite Clyburn’s confidence.
“There’s no one hoping it will succeed more than me, but I’m worried it’s a toxic environment,” Albee added.