Jeff Merkley and Mike Zamore only needed two votes. The Oregon Democrat and his longtime chief of staff had rallied almost all the Senate Democratic Caucus around a proposal to change filibuster rules on election bills. The change would have paved the way for voting rights legislation Democrats had been pursuing for years.
But the objections of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin III and Arizona independent Kyrsten Sinema thwarted that effort in 2022.
“We came out of it feeling like we had moved the ball way down the field, even if we didn’t get into the end zone,” said Zamore, who left the Hill last year and now works as national director of policy and government affairs at the ACLU. “Jeff looked at me across his desk one day and just said, ‘We’ve got to write down everything we learned.’ Because we had spent the last year really honing the argument.”
