House Democrats tell Senate: Voting rights bill exempted from delay | US voting rights

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Top House Democrats are leading a new effort to persuade the Senate to make a landmark exception to the stalling that would allow them to press ahead with suffrage voting rights and election reform legislation on the Republican unanimous opposition.

The sweeping measure to expand voting rights known as S1 fell victim to Republican disruption last month after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his leadership team united Congress to dump the bill in a party-line vote.

Now, angry at Republicans for weaponizing stalling against Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, House Majority Whip James Clyburn is pushing Senate Democrats to end his use of constitutional procedures, according to sources familiar with the matter.

A rare and powerful effort by a member of the House leadership to press changes in the Senate raises alarm among Democrats that the disruption could be a serious hurdle as they race to overturn a wave of Republican voting restrictions.

Ending the stalling use of constitutional measures — and lowering the threshold for passing legislation to a simple 50-50 majority in the Senate — is important because it will almost certainly clear the way for Democrats to expand voting across the United States.

Voting rights and electoral reform legislation remain of particular interest to Democrats as they seek to counter new voter restrictions in Republican-led states that were introduced in response to Trump’s lies about the stolen 2020 presidential election.

Claiborne’s proposal to change the Senate’s rules is supposed to be limited. It would not eliminate the block entirely, and would allow senators in the minority party to continue to use the procedural tactic on other types of legislation.

The problem, as Democrats see it, is that Republicans in recent years have almost rewrote Senate rules to force a supermajority even for bills with bipartisan support. Deactivation bills, which used to be extremely rare, are now routine.

The proposal to create a stall exception for constitutional procedures mirrors the exception Democrats made for judicial nominations in 2013, after Republicans barred former President Obama from picking cabinet positions and the federal judiciary.

Cleburne’s proposal is particularly noteworthy, sources said, as it has broad support from the rest of the House Democratic leadership and is seen by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the only way to break the impasse in the Senate.

The sources said that efforts to create exemptions from the disruption are led largely by Cleburne because of the influence he has with the White House and the familiarity he has with Biden on a personal level. Claiborne, a South Carolina congressman, was instrumental in securing his state for Biden in the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination — something that saved Biden’s campaign from disaster.

When Biden endorsed partial overhaul of the obstruction in March, the prospect of Democrats taking action to undermine the minority party’s ability to block the legislation almost overnight turned from a theoretical question to a potential reality on Capitol Hill.

The sources said the details of what Biden endorsed was far less important than the fact that he supported reform at all, and Claiborne, encouraged by that reception, spoke to White House counsel Steve Ritchetti and Vice President Harris to support his proposal.

McConnell, the Senate’s largest Republican, told the Guardian on Monday that he was not too impressed with Claiborne’s maneuvers. “If it’s not broken, it doesn’t need a fix,” McConnell said of the stall, adding that he would “totally” oppose any changes.

Claiborne’s outreach to top Senate Democrats and the Biden administration comes after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer brought the blocking reform issue to the fore by forcing him to vote last month on some of Biden’s most notorious measures.

The idea was to show moderate Democrats opposed to stalling reforms – most notably Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema – that Republicans under McConnell’s leadership would drown out any Democratic policy proposals in an effort to derail the administration.

Schumer is still strategizing how to pay S1 after pledging to reintroduce the bill after his defeat, according to a source familiar with his thinking. “In the struggle for voting rights, this vote was the starting gun, not the finish line,” Schumer said.

But making an exception for stalling on constitutional procedures like voting rights legislation, first introduced by Democratic Senator Patty Murray, appears to be the primary option despite opposition from the likes of Manchin and Cinema.

Democrats open to making change have previously noted that their argument that a minority party should not have the ability to repeatedly block legislation with broad support resonated with the broader American public.

They also noted that ending its use only partially could have fewer consequences for them if their political fortunes were reversed once they were pushed into the minority in an attempt to block Republican legislation.

“Democratic people haven’t given the House and Senate and the White House to compromise with disobedience,” House Democrat Ayanna Pressley wrote on Twitter after Republicans banned S1. “Repeat the disruption so we can do people’s work.”

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