The speech lived up to the ambitious project it carried: to repair American democracy by quickly passing two bills aimed at protecting the right to vote across the country and securing an electoral framework increasingly threatened by the republicans.
Tuesday, in Georgia, Joe Biden called on elected Americans to choose “democracy rather than autocracy” by dropping, among other things, a rule of obstruction – known as the “filibuster” – in the senate, the existence of which compromises the enactment of these laws.
However, despite his determination and his good intentions, Joe Biden is above all preparing to enter into a new legislative crisis, fueled in part by two senators from his camp. A crisis which, again, risks reducing one of its ambitious projects to nothing.
Bills on the table
There are two: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which stem in part from Biden’s campaign promises to minorities who too often face obstacles when it comes time to vote.
In essence, these laws propose to standardize the rules for access to ballot boxes, whose opening hours and locations are decided piecemeal by the States, the rules for identifying voters or even the mechanics of postal voting. . They seek to put an end to the politically interested redistricting of electoral maps, called “gerrymandering” and exploited in the vast majority by the Republicans in order to dilute the Democratic vote and that of the minorities.
These laws also aim to combat hidden campaign financing, particularly online, to strengthen ballot security and to bring back federal oversight of the electoral process in order to counter an increasingly politicized control of the counting of the ballots and certification of results.
Paradoxically, while denouncing, without ever providing proof, an electoral framework favoring fraud, according to them, the Republicans oppose these bills and prefer to pass local legislation which could facilitate their victory by legalizing executives compromising the equitable and universal expression of the vote.
Realistic bills?
Thursday, the House of Representatives adopted these two bills following the party line at 220 deputies against 203. But there should stop the journey of these texts in the American legislative apparatus.
It is that in the Senate, the so-called “filibuster” rule would require that 60 senators vote in their favour. However, the American upper house is divided 50-50 between the two parties, with a tiny majority for the Democrats which now resides in the hands and above all the vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, President of the Senate.
Initially designed to promote collaboration between political parties, the filibuster has since the 1990s become a tool for obstructing opposition to the policies of the party in power. Obstruction that has grown in a political climate increasingly divided along partisan lines and deep differences over reality.
To overcome the hurdle, President Joe Biden needs the vote of all of his troops in the Senate calling for the rule to be suspended and his electoral reforms to be rammed through. The catch is that two of its senators, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have announced that they will oppose the suspension.
These two Democrats, from the most conservative fringe of the party, regularly oppose the bills brought by Joe Biden before the Senate. Their opposition plays the game of the Republicans whose influence is still very strong within their respective electorates.
“While I continue to support these bills, I will not support separate actions that deepen the rampant division in our country,” Mr.me Sinema on Thursday to justify his opposition to Joe Biden’s strategy.
Necessary for democracy?
The question is crucial, as the country faces a major political crisis since the last ballot and the unaccepted defeat by populist Republican Donald Trump. “Without the support of Sinema and Manchin, the prospect of reforming the electoral framework becomes increasingly gloomy,” summarizes Simon Gilhooley, professor of political science at Bard College, joined by The duty in New York State. The failure of these bills will only aggravate the threats to the democracy of the United States”.
Since a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutted the Voting Rights and Ballot Box Act passed under George W. Bush in 2006, Republicans have been taking advantage of this to make it harder for people to vote. United States, he explains. Decentralized control of electoral rules thus allows them to make restrictive changes to the electoral laws of the states they control.
“These maneuvers accelerated after Donald Trump’s refusal to recognize the result of the 2020 elections, said Mr. Gilhooley, and are now illustrated in an increased politicization of the supervision of the electoral process” in the United States.
In December, the federal Department of Justice also sued Texas for having redrawn the electoral maps in this conservative state so as to reduce the influence of the Latino vote in the next election.
Last year, for the first time in its history, the United States entered the list of countries where democracy is now “in retreat”, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA).
On Friday, President Biden met with the dissenting senators at the White House in hopes of changing their minds. The outcome of the meeting over their tenacious opposition is still uncertain.