Washington Post: Activists gear up for battle as Senate Republicans prepare to block voting rights bill

06.21.2021 / By Mike DeBonis and Elise Viebeck
Washington Post: Activists gear up for battle as Senate Republicans prepare to block voting rights bill

Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel with Common Cause, said Tuesday’s vote is “the first step in a concerted summer-long fight to get this bill across the finish line.” “It’s by no means over tomorrow,” he said.

Liberal activists and Democratic lawmakers are angling to use a planned Senate vote Tuesday on broad legislation to overhaul election access, campaign finance and government ethics — which is expected to fail because of solid Republican opposition — as an inflection point in a major last-ditch push to change Senate rules and pass voting rights legislation before the end of the summer.

Advocates of federal intervention who have been spurred to action by the raft of new, more restrictive state voting laws passed by Republican legislatures face a steep uphill battle after Tuesday’s vote. No GOP senators are expected to vote to even begin debating legislation, and several Democratic senators have made it clear that they oppose a move that could allow further action — eliminating the 60-vote supermajority rule known as the filibuster.

But top party leaders are betting that a show of firm GOP intransigence in Tuesday afternoon’s procedural vote will prompt movement among the handful of wary Democrats. In a fiery floor speech Monday that served, in part, as a veiled appeal to members of his own caucus, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) hammered the point that Republicans were threatening to block even a discussion of voting rights. …

Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel with Common Cause, said Tuesday’s vote is “the first step in a concerted summer-long fight to get this bill across the finish line.”

“It’s by no means over tomorrow,” he said.

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