Vice-president Kamala Harris on Monday warned that the right to vote in America was “under assault” and tens of millions of Americans faced disenfranchisement unless threatened voting rights legislation was passed by US lawmakers.
The speech was given on the Martin Luther King Day public holiday and comes as King’s family and other civil rights activists in America are pushing for expanded federal voting rights legislation despite political opposition from Republicans.
Activists want politicians to pass two measures aimed at expanding voting rights across the country – the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Passing voting rights legislation is seen as crucial in the face of a wave of Republican state legislation aimed at erecting barriers to voting that are likely to suppress the votes of communities of color.
Harris delivered strong words – though no new concrete plan of action – regarding fighting off a wave of Republican-led voting rights suppression. She said: “Our freedom to vote is under assault,” adding that “voter suppression laws can make it more difficult to vote for as many as 55 million Americans, or one out of six people in the country”.
“The proponents of these laws are not only putting in place obstacles to the ballot box; they are also working to interfere in our elections, to get the outcomes they want and discredit those they do not. That is not how democracy works,” Harris added.
Martin Luther King III, King’s eldest son, his wife, Arndrea Waters King, and their daughter Yolanda Renee King led a march on Monday morning across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington DC.
In a statement last week, King III spoke of his father, who would have turned 93 on Saturday, and said that the “stakes could not be higher to protect and expand” his father’s legacy of activism and racial justice.
“Senators now face one of the most existential choices of their tenure: protect our voting rights or go down in history as an enabler of voter suppression,” he said.
In a speech at King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, King’s youngest daughter, Bernice King, emphasized the urgency of expanding voting rights.
“It’s … critical that we shift our priorities so that our freedom to participate in the democracy via the vote isn’t threatened and thwarted by bipartisanship politics and agendas, but is cemented in our constitution and in our collective conscience,” she said.
“We must say to our Senate that voting rights is not an ephemeral effervescent domestic issue that can be kicked about by reactionary guardians of the status quo,” she said, adding, “It is rather an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our nation.”
Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia echoed King’s sentiments, saying, “Right now … we got voter suppression bills having been passed in 19 states, introduced in 49 states and governors and members of Congress are channeling all states’ rights arguments to fight against voting rights.”
“Surely the state doesn’t have a right to block people from voting,” he said.
In December, more than 800 faith leaders, led by King III and his wife, called on the Biden administration and Senate Democrats to pass voting rights legislation. “The communities we represent will continue to sound the alarm until these bills are passed. While we come from different faiths, we are united by our commitment to act in solidarity with the most vulnerable among us,” they said in an open letter.
Harris’s speech urging the Senate to pass the voting rights bills comes after a disappointing week for the Biden administration and skepticism about her and Joe Biden’s ability to do anything to pass the new laws.
Last week, Biden went to the Capitol to urge Senate colleagues to change the chamber’s rules so they could overcome Republican opposition to the voting rights bill, only to be forcefully rejected by two conservative Democrats who hold effective veto power.
The two Democrats, senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have remained opposed to changing filibuster rules, which are necessary to move the bills through. The filibuster means most major legislation requires 60 votes to pass the senate, not a simple majority, and the senate is split 50-50 with the Democrats controlling a tie-breaking vote.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has announced that the Senate will take up voting legislation on Tuesday.
Biden too issued a new statement saying Americans must protect “the sacred right to vote, a right from which all other rights flow”. “It’s time for every elected official in America to make it clear where they stand,” Biden said in a video address. “It’s time for every American to stand up. Speak out, be heard. Where do you stand?”
