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Republicans block voting rights protections from advancing – as it happened

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Wed 19 Jan 2022 22.18 ESTFirst published on Wed 19 Jan 2022 09.30 EST
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The Senate is expected to vote on voting rights legislation this evening. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
The Senate is expected to vote on voting rights legislation this evening. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA

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Key events

Today's politics recap

  • Joe Biden held a marathon press conference on the eve of the one-year anniversary of his inauguration. “It’s been a year of challenges, but it’s also been a year of enormous progress,” the president said. He responded at times contentiously to questions from reporters about his failures to get his Build Back Better platform passed, and his plummeting poll numbers.
  • Joe Manchin – the West Virginia Democrat who has so far blocked much of Biden’s key agenda – spoke on the Senate floor in defense of the filibuster. He made it clear he would not vote to change the procedure to support voting rights reform. Getting rid of the rule, Manchin said, would be “perilous” for the Senate and the US.
  • Bernie Sanders warned he may support primary challengers against Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two holdouts in Senate Democrats’ debate over changing the filibuster to pass a voting rights bill. Sanders told reporters yesterday that he believes “there is a very good chance” the two senators will face primary challenges because of their stance on the filibuster.
  • After hours of lively debate, Republicans, as expected, blocked Democrats’ voting rights legislation from advancing. The Senate now debating a rules change put forth by Democrats to allow the legislation to advance to a final vote regardless, but that effort is also expected to fail.

We’re closing out this blog, but we’ll be updating our coverage of tonight’s voting rights debates. In the meantime, give my colleague Sam Levine’s analysis piece a read:

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Susan Collins, a Republican of Maine, has entered into a heated, passive-aggressive exchange over voting rights with Jon Ossoff, a Democrat of Georgia.

Collins claimed that the Democrats’ voting rights legislation was too long and that she would have voted once more for the 1965 Voting Rights Act that she voted to reauthorize in 2006. In fact, she said, she voted “enthusiastically” for extending Voting Rights Act, and bristled at Ossoff for calling her and other Republicans out for voting down voting rights. “I’m not sure the senator from Georgia was even born in 1965,” she said. “Surely he is not confusing” the current bill with the reauthorization.

Ossoff, who was born in 1987, responded that he was referring to Collins’ refusal to replace provisions of the VRA that were gutted by the Supreme Court with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would do. The court specifically asked Congress to update Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA.

With “great respect” for Collins, Osoff said, “what I was respectfully noting ... was what I believe to be an inconsistency between voting consistently to reauthorize [the VRA] ... but then not voting to even allow debate in this body” on the latest voting bills.

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Republicans have now blocked the Democrats’ voting rights legislation for the fifth time in 6 months.

The Senate now debating a rules change to exempt the bill from 60-vote threshold to advance. Speaking in favor of amending the rules, Angus King of Maine asserted: “If we had the rules that we have today we wouldn’t have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, because it was too easy to stop anything.”

King questioned why Republicans who oppose Democratic legislation wouldn’t at least want bills to advance to a vote. Democrats are not now moving to end the filibuster, but to return to a “talking filibuster” – a system wherein the chamber’s voting rights debate could be brought to a close and the bill advanced, once Republicans seeking to block a vote have run out of turns to speak.

Republicans, as expected, block voting rights protections from advancing

The motion end debate and move to a final vote failed 49-51. It needed 60 votes to pass.

Senate leader Chuck Schumer switched his vote to a no in the end, for a procedural reason - so he can attempt to change Senate rules to allow a simple majority to advance the legislation to a final vote.

Of course, holdouts Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema likely won’t join their Democratic colleagues’ effort to change the rules.

The Senate vote to end debate on the bill and move to a final vote has failed, as expected. Sixty votes were needed to bypass a Republican filibuster.

Democrats are now expected to try to change rules so that they can move onto a final vote with just a simple majority,

Sam Levine
Sam Levine

Senator Roy Blunt claimed that GOP restrictions on voting access weren’t as severe as they appear, arguing states were rolling back unusual expansions they made in 2020 to accommodate voters during the Covid-19 pandemic. But that’s not true. Several of the measures do away with longstanding laws.

  • Georgia Republicans imposed new identification requirements on mail-in ballots, which had been in place since 2005.
  • Arizona Republicans made it harder to stay on a list of voters who permanently receive a mail-in ballot. The list has long been widely used in the state.
  • Montana Republicans got rid of same day registration, which had been in place since 2006.
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Democrats closed out their pleas to pass voting rights legislation with a fiery speech from Georgia senator Raphael Warnock.

He emphasized the importance of passing voting rights protections at all costs. “History is watching us. Our children are counting on us,” he said.

Warnock: "You cannot remember MLK and dismember his legacy at the same time... I will not sit quietly while some make Dr. King a victim of identity theft." pic.twitter.com/GAoZEQdgv9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 20, 2022

For his colleagues who refused to act, he had a cutting message: “You cannot remember MLK and dismember his legacy at the same time,” Warnock said. “I will not sit quietly while some make Dr. King a victim of identity theft.”

The state legislature in Georgia, dominated by Republicans, passed sweeping new restrictions on voting access following the election of Democrats Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate in 2020, and Joe Biden’s victory in the state.

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Bernie Sanders of Vermont said today is a “sad day” for the US, singling out Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for their obstruction.

“I regard it as a very sad day for our country, and I mean this very sincerely, that not one Republican in this body is prepared to vote for this bill,” he said.

“Now, I understand why that is the case,” he continued. “I do not understand why two Democrats who presumably understand the importance of the Freedom to Vote Act, and as I understand it, will vote for the Freedom to Vote Act are not prepared to change the rules so that that bill could actually become law.”

The progressive Vermont senator told reporters on Tuesday that he would support primary challengers to Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia, and Sinema, A Democrat of Arizona.

The Supreme Court rejected a bid by Donald Trump to withhold documents from the congressional committee investigating the 6 January insurrection.

Documents that the committee is seeking include diaries, visitor logs, drafts of speeches and handwritten notes, held by the National Archives and Records Administration. The court has yet to decide whether to hear a broader appeal of lower court rulings that the former president could not assert executive privilege to shield materials from being handed over.

Read more:

Senator Mike Crapo, a Republican of Idaho, just delivered a speech full of misinformation, defending voting restrictions.

With the help of my colleague, the voting rights reporter Sam Levine, I’ve sorted through his speech:

  • Crapo cited 2020 election turnout as a reason not to pass voting rights protections, disregarding the changes in voting rules to make it easier for citizens to vote amid the pandemic.
  • He claimed that it was a “myth” that “Republican state legislatures are enacting laws that will roll back early voting.” He cited Iowa’s 20-day early voting as an example, failing to mention that Iowa Republicans shortened the early voting period from 29 days to 20 last year.
  • He claimed that Georgia’s voting restrictions preventing the distribution of water and food to voters waiting in line to cast ballots applies only to “political organizations”. The Georgia law prevents any “person” – not just political groups – from providing food and water to people in line.
  • “This law of anti-electioneering or anti-vote-buying is standard practice in many states,” Crapo claimed. While it is common for states to have anti-electioneering statutes at the polls, the Georgia law went further to explicitly ban food and water, which is not common. “Georgia already had a ban on electioneering around the polls and if that’s what this was really about they could have written something narrower, such as something that prevents the mention of candidates on any food or water being handed to voters,” Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told the Washington Post in March.
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On the Senate floor, New Mexico senator Ben Ray Luján is detailing how voting restrictions block many Latino and Native Americans from casting their ballots.

“These are American citizens whose rights were taken away for partisan advantage,” he said.

WATCH: Senator Luján addresses the Senate on Voting Rights and filibuster reform. https://t.co/WYLKarU8Oe

— Senator Ben Ray Luján (@SenatorLujan) January 19, 2022

“History will not look kindly on inaction at this critical moment, and we must show the American people that we will not flinch when faced with a choice to protect our democracy or let it crumble before our eyes,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Senate has been debating the Democrats’ voting rights bill, which the chamber is expected to vote down at about 19:45 local time.

Democrats have snuck the bill onto the Senate floor, and circumvented an initial filibuster attempt by tacking it on as an amendment to an unrelated Nasa bill – not unlike the way some parents sneak vegetables into their children’s mac and cheese.

But Democrats still need 60 votes to bypass a Republican filibuster to end debate and start voting on the measure - which they don’t have. So, they’ll move to try to change the filibuster rules. That’ll fail as well, as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema remain adamant against changes to the filibuster.

U.S. Senate debate on #VotingRights continues – LIVE on C-SPAN2 https://t.co/ag4qbs3qA5

Votes expected to begin ~6:30pm ET. pic.twitter.com/Oh3N39TxXg

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 19, 2022
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Joe Biden has wrapped up his marathon, nearly 2-hour press conference, which ran longer than the lengthiest conferences held by Donald Trump or Barack Obama.

This news conference follows criticisms that the president has been avoiding press conferences and making himself directly available to reporters. He called on 24 journalists, taking more than one question from several reporters.

Biden took questions for roughly 100 minutes from (by my count) 24 outlets out of the 30 that got a seat in the East Room for today's press conference. Roughly half of those got called on after he appeared ready to wrap. Here's who got a question (didn't recognize one reporter.) pic.twitter.com/WIG5b8MBob

— Brett Samuels (@Brett_Samuels27) January 19, 2022
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In response to Peter Doocy of Fox News, who asked Biden why he was trying “to pull the country so far to the left?” the president responded: “You guys have been trying to convince me that I am Bernie Sanders. I’m not. I like him. But I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist. I’m a mainstream Democrat and I have been.”

.@pdoocy: "Why are you trying so hard in your first year to pull the country so far to the left?"

President Biden: "Well, I'm not. I don't know what you consider to be too far to the left." pic.twitter.com/bNnWbs1Oce

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 19, 2022
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The president conceded that the child tax credit and free community college provisions were unlikely to make it through the strategy of getting his Build Back Better plan passed in “chunks”.

“They are massive things I’ve run on and care a great deal about,” he noted, but said he wasn’t sure he could get them passed soon. The child tax credit, which was issued initially as temporary relief amid the pandemic, kept 3.7m kids out of poverty in December. But families have been left in limbo after the payments expired, and Joe Manchin killed hopes of making them a permanent resource for struggling parents.

“I don’t believe the polls,” Biden said at the press conference, echoing an infamous refrain from his predecessor.

Asked by a reporter how to win over moderates and independents who backed him in 2020, but have wavered in their support in recent polls. Biden’s approval rating has plunged in recent months. A Gallup poll found released today 40% of US. adults approve of the job he is doing.

His average approval rating has sat at about 42% in recent months. A Quinnipiac poll released last week found his approval rating was as low as 33%, though the White House dismissed it as an outlier.

A defensive Biden today told reporters he’s faced some of the biggest challenges any US president has faced. “I’m not complaining,” he said.

At his press conference to mark one year in office, Joe Biden outlined some of the changes he plans to make for his second year.

The president said he would leave the White House more to communicate his message to the American people, which has been difficult because of coronavirus-related restrictions.

He also said he would consult more with outside experts and be “deeply involved” in the midterm elections, as Democrats seek to defend their narrow majorities in the House and Senate.

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