Joe Biden has been reluctant to touch the filibuster, hoping instead for bipartisan legislation. Back in March, though, he suggested he'd support changing the rules to go back to making the filibuster a performance and endurance art, so that the opposing side would have more skin in the game. That's if the Republican Senate were to be persistently uncooperative on high-priority legislation.
Since then, Republicans have stonewalled legislation relentlessly almost across the board. Since the Senate torpedoed the For the People Act -- and since SCOTUS cut away at voting rights only weeks ago in a decision to uphold Arizona's voting restrictions -- voting rights are coming into focus as too important to leave to Senate obstructionists.
Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), who is the second most powerful Democrat in the House after Nancy Pelosi, is urging Biden to create a carveout that erases the filibuster for voting rights legislation. Clyburn has already talked to Manchin, a West Virginia Senator who seems overly solicitous to Republican concerns. “I'm not asking you to eliminate the filibuster," as Clyburn recalls. "But what I'm saying to you is that nobody ought to have the right to filibuster my constitutional rights.”
Democrats want to pass two voting rights bills, the For the People Act -- which is a bit tougher than its predecessor, the unsuccessful John Lewis Voting Rights Act -- and a bill to re-up some missing parts of the 1965 Voter Rights Act.
Clyburn says that Biden could just call up Joe Manchin and say, "Hey, we should do a carveout." Microphone or telephone, whatever. "Just do it," Clyburn said.
When McConnell ruled the Senate as majority leader, he created such a carveout to get Supreme Court nominees onto the bench. He also gamed the rules to keep Obama's SCOTUS pick, Merrick Garland, from being approved. Using crude-power tactics like that is not what Biden wants to do.
It seems clear, though, that Biden will have to do something of that kind to get the most basic of all civil rights, second only to freedom of speech and religion, past an obstructionist set of conservatives in two branches of government.
Biden is slated to speak on voting rights next Tuesday in Philadelphia.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/562384-clyburn-urges-biden-to-back-filibuster-changes-for-election-reform
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