The Daily - A Last-Gasp Push on Voting Rights

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

It’s a big week in the Senate for voting rights. Democrats have two bills that include measures to bolster and protect elections.But the bills are almost certain to fail.Why has it proved almost impossible to pass legislation so integral to the agenda of President Biden and the Democrats?Guest: Astead W. Herndon, a national political reporter for The New York Times.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Here’s what to know about voting rights and the battle over elections.Democrats’ bid to force through a bill intended to offset state voting restrictions appeared destined to fall to a Republican filibuster.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Biden knows that he cannot pass a set of bills to protect voting rights. So why is he still asking lawmakers to vote on them? Astead Herndon explains. It's Wednesday, January 19th. Astead, can you describe what happened on Tuesday in the U.S. Senate? Set the scene for us. Now, Mr. President, the eyes of the nation will be watching what happens this week in the United States Senate.

Senate Democrats kicked off what is going to be for them this week, a real voting rights focused week. Just a few days removed from what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 93rd birthday. The Senate has begun the debate on the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. They have these two bills that would include a big federal overhaul of the election system, measures to target voter suppression, target gerrymandering in states, and just generally increase the federal government's power to be able to be a backstop against state changes to election systems. And you've heard Democrats say for years that these bills are some of the most important that they have. Someone's standing in line outdoors for hours to do their patriotic duty.

And Georgia Republicans make it a crime to give that person a bottle of water. But the thing is, by the end of this process, when all the passionate speeches are done. By passing the Freedom to Vote John R. Lewis Act, we can meet these challenges and turn back the tide. It's pretty much universal agreement that these bills are doomed and that this will not end with them seeing President Biden's desk. So walk us through how we got to this moment instead.

I mean, as a political reporter, it is genuinely baffling to imagine leaders of a party putting forth a bill that they know will fail, and it seems to require an explanation. So what is the story of why this is happening, and where does that story start? You know, as a general rule, I have learned during covering politics, if a politician is doing something that they know is going to fail, it is because every other option has been exhausted. And it is because this is a last gasp. And that's frankly, where this White House has come to on voting rights. You got to remember

in the presidential primary, not only Biden, but the progressives who were challenging him, and the middle of the road folks in between almost universally agreed on voting rights being the top priority of Democrats. And that only intensified as the campaign went on. You had Donald Trump, who's obviously lies about election fraud, helped fuel the needs for some of this. You had January 6th, a kind of a visceral moment to highlight the importance and the kind of fragility of democracy. And then you also had Republican state legislatures that almost immediately after the 2020 results start passing their own laws to really heighten the importance of this issue. So there was no question about the urgency on the fact of Democrats when they came to the administration.

And they knew they really had one year where Democrats would be in control of Congress. They had the presidency and there was an appetite to attack this kind of thing. But of course, voting rights ends up not being Biden's first priority when he gets into office. It wasn't. But this was a White House that felt that they had multiple urgent crises. And let's remember, initially, they were feeling pretty good about their handling of it. You had a vaccine starting to get rolled out. You had a COVID relief package that was robust. And I remember doing a story at that time where this was a White House that was, frankly, tooting its own horn. It was telling the New York Times that they weren't like Obama's presidency, that they weren't catering to moderates, that they have actually found a space

and window to unite the party on these big things. You read back at the stories of that era, and it is an administration that feels confident, that has dip on the chip, that feels like it is really leading. And that was the window in really which they set the standard for themselves. And that is the window where you also see them leaning a little more into the big social spending package. The big agenda that they promised seemed the most realistic at that time. And where does voting rights fit into that? Well, voting rights advocates were really asking the administration that same question pretty much since day one. They saw voting rights

and democracy as kind of an entry point for this administration. They needed to do this initially. But I mean, we have to be fair. There is an ongoing crisis and pandemic. It was messing with the economy and all of these things. And the White House really focused on those things initially in the hopes that this would allow voting rights to be kind of a capstone. That, you know, after the vaccines were out, after the economy was come roaring back, and after this virus thing was a thing of the past, that, you know, this would be the reward for sticking with them, for getting Democrats in, that by the end of the year, they would be able to get to that issue, but it may not happen

initially. Right. So the message was, be patient. We can hold this party together. We can get all these things done, and then we will turn to voting rights. But we will turn to voting rights, and we will get it done. Absolutely. But frankly, as the year goes on from that kind of end of first quarter, summer and on, it's becoming clear that the path to achieving that is a little rockier than the White House thought. For example, the infrastructure negotiations, which were supposed to be a place of agreement between Democrats and Republicans, took a little longer than they wanted to, even though it was eventually passed. But really, you have the fractures start becoming clear as the White House is trying to pass that Build Back Better Act. It's there where you really see the progressives in the House are so far apart with the moderates of the Senate. And you have an inability for both of those sides to really agree on the size and scope of how the White House should proceed.

of how the White House should proceed. And so, ultimately, they're going longer than they wanted. And you have those moderate senators, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, start making clear their demands are going to chip away at some of the most well-known portions of that bill. And so, increasing minimum wage was eliminated from that bill. Parental leave eliminated from that bill. And a lot of the other packages that were seen as kind of baseline for liberals and progressives were cut. And it culminates with this kind of incredible moment where a Democrat, Joe Manchin, goes on Fox News. I've always said this, Brett, if I can't go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can't vote for it. To really tell the rest of the country that he doesn't see himself getting to a yes on this at all.

You're done. This is a no. This is a no. And so for after all of those months of negotiation, they don't have a bill. And worse than that, they have very little leverage over the people who control the bill's fate. So to review, at the end of year one of this Biden presidency, that high you described at the beginning, that's over. The president can no longer really hold his party together.

Build Back Better is dead, and lots of things are going in the wrong direction, right? I mean, inflation's getting worse, not better. COVID infections are going up, not down. It's a bad moment. I really think that's the only way to see it. And it is in that context that they enter this new year, searching, frankly, for ways to excite an increasingly critical base and to appease increasingly restless lawmakers who see a

midterm election that a lot of people do not think the Democratic Party is well positioned for. So they turned their attention to voting rights. President Biden preparing to give a major speech in Atlanta on Tuesday on voting rights that he hopes will give fresh momentum to efforts in the Senate. And the White House plans this speech in Georgia. I will say he's going to Georgia because Georgia is one of the many states where corrupt acts on the constitutional right to vote and the integrity of elections have taken place. Homer Martin Luther King kind of iconically connected with the civil rights movement and the history of black voting rights in this country.

What I think you will hear him say is about the urgent need to pass legislation to protect the constitutional right to vote and the integrity of our elections. Which is a signal to both their Democratic allies and to political media that they're going all in, that they are putting their capital investment into voting rights, and they want to make a statement here to really push the party forward on that front. They invite all their friends. They invite all the kind of democratic folks who are usually the supporters, activists and organizers. And frankly, they say, we're planting a flag on this issue. Come join us.

And I think you can think of this as them showing their desire to prioritize voting rights, but you could also think of it as them just changing the channel, about them trying to have a conversation on their own terms after having months where the narrative largely was about what the party wasn't agreeing on. Mm-hmm. Okay, so how does this changing the channel thing go? You know, like, not as great as they would have hoped, I imagine. There is a lot of talk among activist groups and among elected officials just about what to make of it. A coalition of voting rights groups in Georgia are planning to boycott President Biden's speech today in Atlanta. On the day of the speech, it becomes clear that some groups just won't stand for it.

You know, we'd rather that the president stayed in D.C. and perhaps delivered this speech to the Senate, to the Democratic caucus. You had Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter call it a photo op. At this point, we don't need another speech. We don't need him to come to Georgia and use us as a prop. What we need is work. Stacey Abrams, who is running again for governor of Georgia and is certainly the most notable Democrat in that state, cited the scheduling conflict.

I spoke with Stacey this morning. We have a great relationship. We've got our scheduling mixed up. I'm going to be proper to talked with her at length this morning. We're all on the same page and everything's fine. But, you know, most people can make room for the president if they would like to. Right. And so I think the general feeling, even before Biden even said something, was this was a sign of the fissures that have now come

on voting rights. These groups are already, frankly, rather exhausted, even before the president started to talk. And just to explain, what are they exhausted of? They're exhausted of the fact that voting rights is a capstone rather than a starting point for this presidency. Yeah. I mean, in some ways they are asking the White House to solve an unsolvable problem, right? We know that the consistent block to those bills happening is the Senate filibuster and the rules that don't allow most things to pass without a 60 person vote. Right. And that has hamstrung Democrats time and time and time again,

and it's doing so now. And so on voting rights, you really have this activist in Georgia saying, spare Georgians your speech. Spare coming here for that backdrop, because this is really a question of just how much individual pressure will you put on Manchin in West Virginia,

on Sinema in Arizona. And that is frankly an insider DC question now. It is not actually a public support driven problem. They said that they've done their jobs and their frustration is that they feel that the White House and elected and Democratic officials in Congress have not done theirs, which is to change the rules to make it happen. And they want the White House to take ownership of the fact that they have to make this happen. Got it. So the reason these activists are snubbing President Biden when he comes to Georgia to give a speech about voting rights is because in their minds, it's like,

why are you giving the speech to us? This is a speech that needs to be delivered to two United States senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are opposed to getting rid of the filibuster in order to pass voting rights legislation. So their message to Biden is, that's your problem. You sort it out. Yeah. And, you know, this isn't just happening in isolation, right? These are many of the same activists who were pushing Joe Biden from day one to take on the issue of voting rights directly. And so their frustration is not actually because they disagree with where the White House has arrived, or even the words that Joe Biden said in Georgia. But really, they think that they did not move urgently enough. And that's a feeling they have had for a long time.

But. In our lives, in the lives of our nation, life of our nation. He gives the speech anyway. There are moments so stark that they divide all that came before and everything that followed. And in terms of words and in terms of rhetoric, it is the speech that activists have been asking for Joe Biden to give for years. Hear me plainly. The battle for the soul of America is not over. We must stand strong and stand together to make sure January 6th marks not the end of democracy, but the beginning of a renaissance of our democracy.

I mean, he frames this as a must pass bills for the state of democracy. Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things, voter suppression and election subversion. He talks about election subversion, a thing that goes beyond just voter suppression and the fears that votes will not be counted properly or they will be disregarded. It's about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all. Which is certainly a growing concern coming out of 2020 and something he hasn't really talked about. Today, I'm making it clear to protect our democracy. I support changing the Senate rules, whichever way they need to be changed. He

explicitly endorses ending the Senate filibuster on the issue of voting rights. So I ask every elected official in America, how do you want to be remembered? He frames it really morally in the legacy of the great racial fights of American history. At consequential moments in history, they present a choice. Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Saying that, frankly, people have a choice about whether they want to be on the side of Bull Connor and other notorious racists or on the sides of John Lewis and civil rights activists. This is the moment to decide to defend our elections, to defend our democracy. It's really a kind of like classic example of the bully pulpit we read about in government class in high school. May God bless you all and may God

protect the sacred right to vote. Thank you. I mean it. This is a president knowing that what he can command is media attention and interest, going to a place to make that even more dramatic and laying out the stakes for this upcoming political fight in hopes of rallying pressure around the Senate holdouts. But by the end of the week, it had become clear that the moral play that he was making, that the bully pulpit he was seeking to use, the influence and pressure he was hoping to have was falling flat. And frankly, voting rights was no closer to passing the day before the speech than the day after. We'll be right back. So instead, let's pick up where we left off. President Biden has asked Democrats to eliminate the filibuster so that he can pass these voting rights bills and told them, basically,

if you don't, you're going to be on the wrong side of history. So what happens next? Well, the speech was the first step of a week of full court press on the White House's part. And the next step was Biden physically going to Capitol Hill to make the pitch he made in Georgia in person. Which is rare, by the way. Presidents don't normally go to the Capitol. Usually the Capitol comes to the presidents. Absolutely. It is an intentional show of political force. It's intentional use of political capital. It's basically the White House doing what those activists in Georgia said they should do, which is take that speech and give it to the people who are on the Hill. The problem is...

Mr. President. The senator from Arizona. The problem is, even as the president is arriving to make that concerted pitch, the relevant Democrats made clear to him that they weren't really receptive or listening. You had Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona give what was, in my opinion, a surprisingly direct speech about her opposition to the filibuster. While I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country. Both reinforcing that that position is unchanged and really throwing cold water on this political moment that the White House was trying to create. We must address the disease itself, the disease of division, to protect our democracy. And it cannot be achieved by one party alone.

She is standing in the most public place you can on Capitol Hill, saying that the very thing that the president is there to try to do is a non-starter. We have but one democracy. We can only survive. We can only keep her if we do so together. Thank you. And so here you have the president on the same day in which he comes to the Capitol to make that political investment, really have a kind of public embarrassment with Sinema. And later that same day with Joe Manchin of West Virginia,

who released a statement saying he was also opposed to changes in the filibuster, a position he's held for a while. He reiterated it on that same day. I think this is not only Biden taking a hit in a political sense, but taking it in a kind of public way. The key point of his agenda is dying before his eyes here at the Capitol. The key point of his agenda is dying before his eyes here at the Capitol. Because what they're saying is we refuse to change the filibuster, which is the equivalent of saying your voting rights bills are dead. It means your voting rights bill is dead. It means your gun reform bill is dead. It means that everything is dead that either doesn't specifically appeal to Republicans or doesn't fit that narrow budget definition

of something that relates to the economy and can therefore go through budget reconciliation and only require 50 votes. That means that so many of the agenda items that Democrats have really promised to people as a baseline are probably not going to be addressed in this current environment. I mean, voting rights is the tip of the spear,

but we're really talking about what is the larger democratic agenda. And it's a real blow to the overall strategy too, right? The reason you do the speech, the reason you make the public moral play on this issue is in the hopes that cinema and manschin see that public pressure and cave, or at least seem open or have a renewed openness to the discussion. But when you have a senator who's willing to go and make such a public statement against it, it is not only a legislative blow, as we said, but it just means that that shame tactic, that pressure tactic, isn't really working.

But as I said, surely President Biden knew that this was how it was going to play out, right? Maybe not in the particular way it played out with two members of his own party essentially embarrassing him so publicly on the Hill, but he had to know that Senators Sinema and Manchin would not change their position on ending the filibuster. They've been consistent about this. So why then so publicly call for something that isn't going to happen, especially given the implications you just outlined, which is that it not happening is very consequential in a bad way for the entire rest of the presidency? Because it's the only play that was really left. He knows that these are people who has independent political power in their left. He knows that these are people who have independent political power in their states. He knows that these are headstrong folks, and he knows Manchin and Sinema.

But he also is dealing with competing pressures, as we talked about, from activist groups, from organizers, and from a public that wants to see that they understand the urgency of the issue, even if they cannot get the things done. And so what we essentially see the White House saying is that saying something, even if you can't do anything, is better than saying nothing and not doing anything. That when you go to Georgia, they are going to be as explicit as possible in hopes, frankly, that the public and that the midterm voters give them effort points. Effort points. Yeah, give them an A for effort.

They want to shift the blame is probably the best way to say it. And so that a voter can still feel good about the Biden presidency, even with the agenda items that were supposed to come from the Biden presidency have not come. So the way the White House is positing doing that is making clear that it was not because they don't want those things, but these individual senators are blocking them from doing those things. Right. So we may be failing here, but we're going to fail trying. And communicating that trying and that urgency, that's important to the White House at this moment. Yes. And that we should be clear because look at the political context. They have entered now into an election year where Democrats are already facing an uphill climb in the midterm elections,

and they are going to need the energy of their base, right? You're starting to hear more and more Democrats say that they need to show the voters that they are trying. That really only works, though, for a baseline Democrat, for someone who already likes you, for someone who is already inclined to vote for you. Where Democrats think that they have to go, though, the voter that they need is a marginal voter, is someone who often sits out the midterms, is a young person, is someone who is not college educated, is someone who is outside of the sphere of people who are already their baseline set of voters who come out. And the problem is, you talk to any kind of consultant, political person, organizer, I have

never heard anyone say that that type of marginal voter is moved by the effort points, right? Those are the type of people who specifically want things that touch them, who are removed from the political process, who really the word filibuster is a word from another planet, right? Those are the type of voters who have to be motivated. And explain to that person why it's a senator's fault and not the president's fault is a lot harder of a task. Because frankly, you all got these next to your

name. It's the open question of whether that type of person is looking at a speech in Georgia and absolving the president of guilt. If that answer is no, if they didn't look at the speech in Georgia, if they don't care about the distinctions between Senator Manchin, if they're not absolving Blaine because of the filibuster, then yeah, not delivering on voting rights is a problem. So that leaves Biden on an issue like voting rights speaking to a pretty narrow band of Democratic voters, the base, the people who would care about effort points. And it would leave him less effectively speaking to those people you just mentioned, the people who want deliverables and aren't that ideological and aren't that obsessed with politics. And it seems like you need all those voters to show up if you're a Democratic president trying to keep control

of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. Totally. For Democrats to succeed, it is pretty universally agreed that they need to do all of the above, and not passing voting rights makes that more difficult. It also has another effect, kind of irrespective of messaging, which is that it is the gateway to how power functions. And so in Democrats' own language, these bills are a little more important than the other ones. Right. Because, you know, Eric Holder, the former attorney general, told me that he sees it as we might not have fair elections if these bills don't pass in the future. And so if those are the stakes, there's not just a political impact to individually not passing these bills and the type of people who

are disappointed. But we're talking about a party impact of how do Democrats ensure that they have representation across the country. Right. Because if Democrats are to be believed about why these bills need to be passed in the first place, it's because there's a threat to the election system in the country. And candidly, they would say a threat to them more than to anybody else. And so not passing these bills is not just a political problem for Democrats, right? It's like a mechanical problem in their ability, they would argue, to actually get votes counted and get election victories certified. Absolutely. And for a lot of people across the country, it is like put up or shut up time about the threat. You know, the folks who are looking at Biden, the people who skipped that speech, really what they are saying is that they want a Democratic Party that is putting as much

effort into the solution as they are into the description of the problem. And for a lot of the organizers and activists, they really feel like these politicians are coming to their communities over and over to tell them about a threat that they already know, right? Like that they've lived with, not in the last 10 years, but in the history of this country. You ain't got to tell Georgia about voting rights, right? These people feel that it is about follow through. it is about follow through. So at the end of the day,

will a failure to pass voting rights be better or worse than never having called for and carried out a debate and voted on it at all? Well, we've talked about the challenges to really motivating people in the short term on trying and effort.

But I really think this is a long-term question. The stakes of voting rights, as described by the Democratic Party, are no less than the democracy itself, right? These bills are supposed to be the thin line between fair and honest elections and not, against an ongoing Republican threat. If Democrats are right, and the failure to pass these bills changes how we have to think about elections in the future, changes the fairness question, I don't think credit in the short term of this midterms will be what people remember.

in the short term of this midterms, will be what people remember. I really think it will be about blame. I think people will look back at a window of action and wonder who was asleep at the wheel. Well, Sted, thank you very much. We appreciate it, as always. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, two large wireless carriers, AT&T and Verizon, said they would limit the rollout of 5G networks near airports,

after airlines warned that the new technology could trigger major disruptions to flights. The airlines argue that the wireless frequency used for 5G service is similar to that used by an essential airport technology that determines the distance between planes and the ground. As a result, several airlines, including Air India and Emirates, said they would cancel or suspend flights to the U.S. But wireless companies say those concerns are overblown and note that 5G's rollout in France and Britain has caused no major disruptions at airports. And the Biden administration has launched a website

that will allow Americans to order home COVID tests for free. The site www.covidtests.gov limits the number of tests to four per household and says that delivery of the tests will take between seven and 12 days. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Jessica Chung, and Stella Tan. It was edited by Paige Cowan and John Ketchum, contains original music by Dan Powell, and engineered by Alishaba Itu. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.