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:
Updated
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.
Updated
