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      As Republicans Take Aim at Voting, Democrats Search for a Response

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      A speech by President Biden on Tuesday could be a signal of how hard the Democrats will fight to protect voting rights. WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party pledged millions for it last week, grass-roots groups are campaigning for it nationwide and, as recently as Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said the fight for it had only begun.But behind the brave words are rising concerns among voting-rights advocates and Democrats that the counterattack against the aggressive push by Republicans to restrict ballot access is faltering, and at a potentially pivotal moment.President Biden is expected to put his political muscle behind the issue in a speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday. But in Congress, Democratic senators have been unable to move voting and election bills that would address what many of them call a fundamental attack on American democracy that could lock in a new era of Republican minority rule. And in the courts, attacks on voting restrictions face an increasingly hostile judiciary and narrowing legal options.Texas seems poised, absent another walkout by Democratic legislators, to become the latest Republican-controlled state to pass a sweeping legislative agenda placing new barriers to the ability to cast a ballot. That comes on the heels of a major Supreme Court ruling this month further weakening the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court nullified its major provision in 2012. The decision arrived as advocacy groups were pressing lawsuits against restrictive voting laws enacted in roughly a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures.“One more arrow has been taken out of the quiver of voting-rights plaintiffs to strike down these new laws passed since the 2020 election,” said Nathaniel Persily, an election-law scholar at Stanford. “And it’s not like they had all that many arrows in the quiver to begin with.”Roughly a dozen Republican-controlled states passed laws this past spring restricting voting or significantly changing election rules, ostensibly in response to President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that voter fraud cost him the November election. Many made it harder to vote early or by mail, banned or restricted drop boxes, shortened early or absentee voting periods or gave more leeway to partisan poll watchers. Some laws made it easier to replace local election officials with partisans, something voting rights advocates say might make it possible even to invalidate or sway election results. Atop that, Republican filibuster threats have bottled up the flagship effort by congressional Democrats to counter such restrictions — a sweeping overhaul of federal election laws and a beefed-up revision of the Voting Rights Act. Despite controlling the Senate, Democrats have failed to unite behind a change in filibuster rules that would allow them to pass the legislation with a simple majority vote. That is a painful reversal for Democrats, who had labeled the bills their top priority, and for Mr. Biden, who said a year ago that strengthening the Voting Rights Act would be his first task in the White House. It also has far-reaching ramifications: The election-overhaul bill would set minimum standards for ballot access, potentially undoing some provisions of the newly enacted laws, and ban gerrymandering just as states begin drawing new boundaries for House seats and local political districts.Democrats worry that failing to act will empower states led by Republicans to impose more restrictions before the 2024 presidential election — a genuine concern, they say, given that Mr. Biden carried the Electoral College by fewer than 43,000 votes in three key states, despite outpolling Mr. Trump by seven million votes nationwide. President Biden said a year ago that strengthening the Voting Rights Act would be his first task in the White House.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesAnd some worry that a Republican Party that still refuses to accept the legitimacy of the last presidential vote sets the stage for a constitutional crisis should red states, or even a Republican-led House of Representatives, contest the next close election. “There’s not a caucus meeting that goes by that our leadership doesn’t talk about S. 1 and how our democracy is on the verge of disappearing,” U.S. Representative John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who has spent 14 years in the House, said in an interview, using shorthand for voting legislation stalled in the Senate. “There’s plenty to be scared about.”Republicans argue that it’s Democrats who are the threat to democracy. “The Democratic Party wants to rewrite the ground rules of American politics for partisan benefit,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said at a hearing on the bill to overhaul voting laws, called the For the People Act. “It’s hard to imagine anything that would erode public confidence in our democracy more drastically.”Mr. McConnell has called the proposal “a craven political calculation” that shows “disdain for the American people.”In the states, Republican legislators have frequently taken a similar tack, charging that Democrats oppose tightening voting rules because they benefit from voter fraud.More common among voting experts, though, is a view that Republicans, facing unfavorable demographic tides, see their future linked to limiting Democratic turnout. “They’re going to do everything they can to hold on to power, and one essential of that is limiting the Democratic vote,” said Larry J. Sabato, a veteran political analyst and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Voting-rights advocates and the Biden administration are not without weapons. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has already sued to block voting legislation enacted by the Georgia General Assembly this past spring, and more lawsuits are likely.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris said that the Democratic National Committee planned to spend $25 million before the 2022 midterms to organize and educate voters.And a number of voting rights advocates said they believed that the breadth and the audacity of Republican voting restrictions was igniting a backlash that would power a grass-roots voting movement and increase Democratic turnout in the midterms.“It could well have a significant pushback,” said Miles Rapoport, a senior fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at Harvard. “The extra motivation of ‘You’re not going to take away my vote’ could end up with very, very heavy turnout come 2022 and 2024.”But voting issues could be a motivator for both parties and, in a highly polarized electorate, the moral high ground can be hard to establish. “I think a lot of this from the other side is political theater,” Representative Briscoe Cain, the Republican House Elections Committee chairman in Texas said in a phone interview on Sunday night. The goal, he said, is to “win elections and make Republicans look bad.”Advocacy groups and Democrats also are in the courts. In Georgia alone, eight lawsuits are challenging Republican election laws enacted in the spring. Marc Elias, a longtime lawyer for Democratic Party interests, is opposing new election laws in seven Republican-dominated states.How badly the Supreme Court ruling will hinder such efforts is unclear. The 6-to-3 decision, covering Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, made it much harder to attack a voting restriction based principally on its lopsided impact on a minority group.Mr. Elias called the ruling “a terrible decision,” but added that most election lawsuits claim violations of the Constitution, not the Voting Rights Act.Richard L. Hasen, a leading election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, was less sanguine, arguing that one part of the ruling has given states wide latitude to defend restrictions as necessary to prevent fraud — even if there is no evidence of fraud. Stopping fraud is by far the leading reason cited by Republican legislators sponsoring curbs on voting.“There’s no question that the road is much tougher for voting rights plaintiffs in federal courts,” he said. “These battles will have to be fought within each state, mustering coalitions among business groups, civil leaders and voters from all parties who care about the sanctity of the right to vote.”Legal options also exist outside the federal judiciary. Mr. Elias recently won a suit claiming discrimination against college-age voters in the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is challenging North Carolina’s voter ID requirements in that state’s Supreme Court. Demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., in June to protest for equal voting rights.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesAnd Alison Riggs, a voting-rights lawyer and co-executive director of the coalition, noted that Congress could easily address concerns with the court’s ruling in any revision of the Voting Rights Act.Mr. Biden’s speech on Tuesday may signal whether he intends to become involved in pushing that legislation and the overhaul of voting laws to passage. Mr. Biden made voting issues a priority in his campaign, but as president he has emphasized bread-and-butter issues like infrastructure spending and coronavirus relief. He was largely absent in June when Democrats in the Senate tried and failed to bring up the For the People Act for debate — in part, perhaps, because even Democrats realized that it must be stripped down to a more basic bill to have a chance of passing.The president is unlikely to have that option again. Over the weekend, a close ally, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, told Politico that Mr. Biden must push to modify the filibuster so both voting bills could pass.So did civil rights leaders in a meeting with the president on Thursday. “We will not be able to litigate our way out of this threat to Black citizenship, voting and political participation,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said later. “We need legislation to be passed in Congress.”The consequences of doing that — or not — could be profound, said Dr. Sabato. “If there was ever a moment to act, it would be now, because Republican legislatures with Republican governors are going to go even further as we move into the future,” he said.“For years, Democrats will point to this as a missed moment. And they’ll be right.”David Montgomery contributed reporting. More

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      Why America’s Politics Are Stubbornly Fixed, Despite Momentous Changes

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      The country is recovering from a pandemic and an economic crisis, and its former president is in legal and financial peril. But no political realignment appears to be at hand.In another age, the events of this season would have been nearly certain to produce a major shift in American politics — or at least a meaningful, discernible one.Over a period of weeks, the coronavirus death rate plunged and the country considerably eased public health restrictions. President Biden announced a bipartisan deal late last month to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding the country’s worn infrastructure — the most significant aisle-crossing legislative agreement in a generation, if it holds together. The Congressional Budget Office estimated on Thursday that the economy was on track to regain all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic by the middle of 2022.And in a blow to Mr. Biden’s fractious opposition, Donald J. Trump — the dominant figure in Republican politics — faced an embarrassing legal setback just as he was resuming a schedule of campaign-style events. The Manhattan district attorney’s office charged his company, the Trump Organization, and its chief financial officer with “sweeping and audacious” financial crimes.Not long ago, such a sequence of developments might have tested the partisan boundaries of American politics, startling voters into reconsidering their assumptions about the current president, his predecessor, the two major parties and what government can do for the American people.These days, it is hard to imagine that such a political turning point is at hand.“I think we’re open to small moves; I’m not sure we’re open to big moves,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Partisanship has made our system so sclerotic that it isn’t very responsive to real changes in the real world.”Amid the mounting drama of the early summer, a moment of truth appears imminent. It is one that will reveal whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion, or whether the country is essentially locked into a schism for the foreseeable future, with roughly 53 percent of Americans on one side and 47 percent on the other.Mr. Biden’s job approval has been steady in the mid-50s for most of the year, as his administration has pushed a shots-and-checks message about beating the virus and reviving the economy. His numbers are weaker on subjects like immigration and crime; Republicans have focused their criticism on those areas accordingly.This weekend, the president and his allies have mounted something of a celebratory tour for the Fourth of July: Mr. Biden headed to Michigan, one of the vital swing states that made him president, while Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Las Vegas to mark a revival of the nation’s communal life.On Friday, Mr. Biden stopped just short of declaring that happy days are here again, but he eagerly brandished the latest employment report showing that the economy added 850,000 jobs in June.“The last time the economy grew at this rate was in 1984, and Ronald Reagan was telling us it’s morning in America,” Mr. Biden said. “Well, it’s getting close to afternoon here. The sun is coming out.”Yet there is little confidence in either party that voters are about to swing behind Mr. Biden and his allies en masse, no matter how many events appear to align in his favor.Democratic strategists see that as no fault of Mr. Biden’s, but merely the frustrating reality of political competition these days: The president — any president — might be able to chip away at voters’ skepticism of his party or their cynicism about Washington, but he cannot engineer a broad realignment in the public mood.Mr. Mellman said the country’s political divide currently favored Mr. Biden and his party, with a small but stable majority of voters positively disposed toward the president. But even significant governing achievements — containing the coronavirus, passing a major infrastructure bill — may yield only minute adjustments in the electorate, he said.“Getting a bipartisan bill passed, in the past, would have been a game changer,” Mr. Mellman said. “Will it be in this environment? I have my doubts.”Russ Schriefer, a Republican strategist, offered an even blunter assessment of the chances for real movement in the electorate. He said that the receding of the pandemic had helped voters feel better about the direction the country is moving in — “the Covid reopening certainly helps with the right-track numbers” — but that he saw no evidence that it was changing the way they thought about their preferences between the parties.“I don’t think anything has particularly changed,” Mr. Schriefer said. “If anything, since November people have retreated further and further back into their own corners.”Supporters cheered former President Donald J. Trump during a rally in Ohio last month.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAmerican voters’ stubborn resistance to external events is no great surprise, of course, to anyone who lived through the 2020 election. Last year, Mr. Trump presided over an out-of-control pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and caused the American economy to collapse. He humiliated the nation’s top public health officials and ridiculed basic safety measures like mask wearing; threatened to crush mass demonstrations with military force; outlined no agenda for his second term; and delivered one of the most self-destructive debate performances of any presidential candidate in modern history.Mr. Trump still won 47 percent of the vote and carried 25 states. The trench lines of identity-based grievance he spent five years digging and deepening — pitting rural voters against urban ones, working-class voters against voters with college degrees, white voters against everybody else — saved him from an overwhelming repudiation.A Pew Research Center study of the 2020 election results released this past week showed exactly what scale of voter movement is possible in the political climate of the Trump era and its immediate aftermath.The electorate is not entirely frozen, but each little shift in one party’s favor seems offset by another small one in the opposite direction. Mr. Trump improved his performance with women and Hispanic voters compared with the 2016 election, while Mr. Biden expanded his party’s support among moderate constituencies like male voters and military veterans.The forces that made Mr. Trump a resilient foe in 2020 may now shield him from the kind of exile that might normally be inflicted on a toppled former president enveloped in criminal investigations and facing the prospect of financial ruin. Polls show that Mr. Trump has persuaded most of his party’s base to believe a catalog of outlandish lies about the 2020 election; encouraging his admirers to ignore his legal problems is an old trick by comparison.The divisions Mr. Trump carved into the electoral map are still apparent in other ways, too: Even as the country reopens and approaches the point of declaring victory over the coronavirus, the states lagging furthest behind in their vaccination campaigns are nearly all strongholds of the G.O.P. While Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to get vaccinated, his contempt for public health authorities and the culture of vaccine skepticism in the right-wing media has hindered easy progress.Yet the social fissures that have made Mr. Trump such a durable figure have also cemented Mr. Biden as the head of a majority coalition with broad dominance of the country’s most populous areas. The Democrats do not have an overwhelming electoral majority — and certainly not a majority that can count on overcoming congressional gerrymandering, the red-state bias of the Senate and the traditional advantage for the opposition party in midterm elections — but they have a majority all the same.And if Mr. Biden’s approach up to this point has been good enough to keep roughly 53 percent of the country solidly with him, it might not take a major political breakthrough — let alone a season of them — to reinforce that coalition by winning over just a small slice of doubters or critics. There are strategists in Mr. Biden’s coalition who hope to do considerably more than that, either by maneuvering the Democratic Party more decisively toward the political center or by competing more assertively with Republicans on themes of economic populism (or perhaps through some combination of the two).Mr. Biden’s aides have already briefed congressional Democrats several times on their plans to lean hard into promoting the economic recovery as the governing party’s signature achievement — one they hope to reinforce further with a victory on infrastructure.Faiz Shakir, who managed Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, said Democrats did not need to worry about making deep inroads into Mr. Trump’s base. But if Mr. Biden and his party managed to reclaim a sliver of the working-class community that had recently shifted right, he said, it would make them markedly stronger for 2022 and beyond.“All you need to focus on is a 5 percent strategy,” Mr. Shakir said. “What 5 percent of this base do you think you can attract back?”But Mr. Shakir warned that Democrats should not underestimate the passion that Mr. Trump’s party would bring to that fight, or the endurance of the fault lines that he had used to reorganize American politics.“He has animated people around those social and racial, cultural, cleavages,” Mr. Shakir said of Mr. Trump. “That keeps people enthused. It’s sad but it is the case that that is going on.” More

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      Kamala Harris Isn’t Being Helped by Joe Biden

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      On Sunday, after Vice President Kamala Harris’s visit to the southern border, the White House felt the need to issue a statement calling her trip a “success.” The statement cited as supporting evidence five tweets by Democratic allies of hers and some neutral media accounts. That’s a relatively modest definition of success, but then again, there were no defensive moments like during the NBC News interview in Guatemala in which she called a border visit a “grand gesture” and noted that she hadn’t visited Europe as vice president, either.Addressing the root causes of migration is one of several jobs President Biden has handed Ms. Harris, who had no deep expertise with Latin America issues or the decades-long quandary of federal immigration reform. He has also asked her to lead the administration’s voting-rights efforts, which are in a filibuster limbo. According to The Times, he has her working on combating vaccine hesitancy and fighting for policing reform, too, among other uphill battles.It’s gotten to the point that every time I see Ms. Harris, I immediately think of “The Wiz” and hear Michael Jackson singing:You can’t win, you can’t break evenAnd you can’t get out of the gamePeople keep sayin’ things are gonna changeBut they look just like they’re stayin’ the sameMs. Harris, at this point, can’t seem to win for trying. She is a historic yet inexperienced vice president who is taking on work that can easily backfire as so many people sit in judgment, with critics sniping (especially right-wing commentators) and allies spinning (like with official statements about “success”).And all the while, the clock is ticking. Most political observers think that if Mr. Biden decides not to run for re-election in 2024 (when he will be 81), Ms. Harris most definitely will. He had to know that in choosing her as his vice president, he was making her his heir apparent. But based on how things look now, her work as his No. 2 could end up being baggage more than a boon. Mr. Biden and his team aren’t giving her chances to get some wins and more experience on her ledger. Rather, it’s the hardest of the hard stuff.Ms. Harris is a complicated figure. She is not a progressive darling — never has been. As with Barack Obama, the only thing radical about her is her skin color and gender in the Oval Office. On a more substantive level, how Ms. Harris deals with her portfolio will surely alienate the left and centrist factions of the Democratic Party. She was far from a diversity hire for Mr. Biden, and she has clear potential as a national leader, but she needs the time, support and right combination of goals to learn and grow. She needs a mix of tough targets and ones that show her ideas and creativity, as Al Gore had with his Reinventing Government effort, rather than a portfolio consisting of the most difficult policy challenges in 21st-century America.The way things are going, if Mr. Biden decides not to run again in 2024, countless male Democratic senators and governors would challenge Ms. Harris for the nomination. On one level, there are far too many male leaders who wake up each morning, brush their teeth, look in the mirror and say, “I can do this job I am wholly unqualified for. Let’s go!” But there are also other reasons she would face competition — ones we aren’t talking about.This country has yet to have an honest conversation and reflection on the ways in which race and gender play out in electoral politics. There are voters who look at Ms. Harris and immediately believe she is unqualified for the job because of her gender, her immigrant parents and the color of her skin. Republicans tend to say the quiet part loud, but if we are being honest, far too many Democrats would never be able to vote for a Black woman at the top of the ticket, no matter how qualified.Many white liberals like racial and gender equality in theory but get a little gun shy when asked to make room at the table for others on a long list of issues — school integration, housing, homelessness, incarceration, policing and executive leadership among them. And for those of you scoffing, ask yourself why you can list almost every major and minor flaw of Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to name just a few. Many liberals struggle with issues of gender and race in practice; they may not admit to having a problem with Ms. Harris per se, but many still expect her to conform to certain standards and judge her harshly when she struggles on issues that are difficult to begin with.Many voters do not see women of color, and Black women specifically, as capable of executive leadership, as evidenced by the lack of any Black female governors in the history of the United States. We must also wrestle with the fact that there have been only two Black female U.S. senators in history. Therefore, for Mr. Biden to select an African American woman from the traditional pool of acceptable vice-presidential candidates of senators and governors, he had an N of one. As brilliant as Stacey Abrams has proved herself to be, the political imagination in this country has yet to evolve to the point that many voters would support a selection of a brilliant politician and policy expert whose highest elected office was minority leader of the Georgia House.No one has been able to solve the complicated issue of immigration and undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. border, yet Ms. Harris is charged with solving it. As the child of not one but two immigrants and the No. 2 leader of an imperial nation, she is the one charged with telling people in Guatemala “do not come” to the United States. She undertakes tasks at the pleasure of the president, but this particular role reminds me of Admiral Ackbar’s declaration in “Return of the Jedi”: “It’s a trap!” If she is somehow miraculously able to detangle the complex “immigration crisis,” she will be heralded by some, but not all, as a success and worthy of the Democratic nomination in 2024. If she becomes only the latest leader (in either party) who cannot solve the problem, she specifically will be viewed as a failure.The role of the vice president has always been undefined, left largely up to the president to shape. Ms. Harris is clearly not a yes man like Mike Pence, the one completely running the show like Dick Cheney or an institutional encyclopedia and counsel the way Mr. Biden was to Mr. Obama.Ms. Harris’s political aspirations clearly extend beyond the vice presidency, but the way the Biden team seems to be playing out the old Life cereal commercial here — “Let’s get Mikey” — makes her political future uncertain. There will be no shortage of Democratic colleagues gunning for her, not to mention Republican politicians and the right-wing media that together revel in misinformation and caricature. I can imagine a scenario in which she is the face that launches a thousand ships but all of those ships will be fighting against her, not for her.Until then, Ms. Harris will do what any faithful vice president does: put her head down, let the president shine and work on her vast portfolio with the staff she has. Hopefully for her, those lyrics from “The Wiz” won’t ring true.Christina Greer is a political scientist at Fordham University. She is political editor at TheGrio and a co-host of the podcast “What’s in It for Us?” More

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      Republicans Block Voting Rights Bill, Dealing Blow to Biden and Democrats

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      All 50 G.O.P. senators opposed the sweeping elections overhaul, leaving a long-shot bid to eliminate the filibuster as Democrats’ best remaining hope to enact legal changes.WASHINGTON — Republicans on Tuesday blocked the most ambitious voting rights legislation to come before Congress in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ attempts to counter a wave of state-level ballot restrictions and supercharging a campaign to end the legislative filibuster.President Biden and Democratic leaders said the defeat was only the beginning of their drive to steer federal voting rights legislation into law, and vowed to redouble their efforts in the weeks ahead.“In the fight for voting rights, this vote was the starting gun, not the finish line,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. “We will not let it go. We will not let it die. This voter suppression cannot stand.”But the Republican blockade in the Senate left Democrats without a clear path forward, and without a means to beat back the restrictive voting laws racing through Republican-led states. For now, it will largely be left to the Justice Department to decide whether to challenge any of the state laws in court — a time-consuming process with limited chances of success — and to a coalition of outside groups to help voters navigate the shifting rules.Democrats’ best remaining hope to enact legal changes rests on a long-shot bid to eliminate the legislative filibuster, which Republicans used on Tuesday to block the measure, called the For the People Act. Seething progressive activists pointed to the Republicans’ refusal to even allow debate on the issue as a glaring example of why Democrats in the Senate must move to eliminate the rule and bypass the G.O.P. on a range of liberal priorities while they still control Congress and the presidency.They argued that with former President Donald J. Trump continuing to press the false claim that the election was stolen from him — a narrative that many Republicans have perpetuated as they have pushed for new voting restrictions — Democrats in Congress could not afford to allow the voting bill to languish.Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, denounced any attempt to gut the filibuster.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times“The people did not give Democrats the House, Senate and White House to compromise with insurrectionists,” Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote on Twitter. “Abolish the filibuster so we can do the people’s work.”Liberal activists promised a well-funded summertime blitz, replete with home-state rallies and million-dollar ad campaigns, to try to ramp up pressure on a handful of Senate Democrats opposed to changing the rules. Mounting frustration with Republicans could accelerate a growing rift between liberals and more moderate lawmakers over whether to try to pass a bipartisan infrastructure and jobs package or move unilaterally on a far more ambitious plan.But key Democratic moderates who have defended the filibuster rule — led by Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — appeared unmoved and said their leaders should try to find narrower compromises, including on voting and infrastructure bills.Ms. Sinema dug in against eliminating the filibuster on the eve of the vote, writing an op-ed in The Washington Post defending the 60-vote threshold. Without the rule there to force broad consensus, she argued, Congress could swing wildly every two years between enacting and then reversing liberal and conservative agenda items.“The filibuster is needed to protect democracy, I can tell you that,” Mr. Manchin told reporters on Tuesday.In their defeat, top Democrats appeared keen to at least claim Republicans’ unwillingness to take up the bill as a political issue. They planned to use it in the weeks and months ahead to stoke enthusiasm with their progressive base by highlighting congressional Republicans’ refusal to act to preserve voting rights at a time when their colleagues around the country are racing to clamp down on ballot access.Vice President Kamala Harris spent the afternoon on Capitol Hill trying to drum up support for the bill and craft some areas of bipartisan compromise.Erin Schaff/The New York Times“Once again, Senate Republicans have signed their names in the ledger of history alongside Donald Trump, the big lie and voter suppression — to their enduring disgrace,” Mr. Schumer said. “This vote, I’m ashamed to say, is further evidence that voter suppression has become part of the official platform of the Republican Party.”Democrats’ bill, which passed the House in March, would have ushered in the largest federally mandated expansion of voting rights since the 1960s, ended the practice of partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, forced super PACs to disclose their big donors and created a new public campaign financing system.It would have pushed back against more than a dozen Republican-led states that have enacted laws that experts say will make it harder for people of color and young people to vote, or shift power over elections to G.O.P. legislators. Other states appear poised to follow suit, including Texas, whose Republican governor on Tuesday called a special legislative session in July, when lawmakers are expected to complete work on a voting bill Democrats temporarily blocked last month.After months of partisan wrangling over the role of the federal government in elections, the outcome on Tuesday was hardly a surprise to either party. All 50 Senate Democrats voted to advance the federal legislation and open debate on other competing voting bills. All 50 Republicans united to deny it the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster, deriding it as a bloated federal overreach.Republicans never seriously considered the legislation, or a narrower alternative proposed in recent days by Mr. Manchin. They mounted an aggressive campaign in congressional committees, on television and finally on the floor to portray the bill as a self-serving federalization of elections to benefit Democrats. They called Democrats’ warnings about democracy hyperbolic. And they defended their state counterparts, including arguments that the laws were needed to address nonexistent “election integrity” issues Mr. Trump raised about the 2020 election.“The filibuster is needed to protect democracy, I can tell you that,” Senator Joe Manchin III said.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesSenate Republicans particularly savaged provisions restructuring the Federal Election Commission to avoid deadlocks and the proposed creation of a public campaign financing system for congressional campaigns.“These same rotten proposals have sometimes been called a massive overhaul for a broken democracy, sometimes just a modest package of tweaks for a democracy that’s working perfectly and sometimes a response to state actions, which this bill actually predates by many years,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader. “But whatever label Democrats slap on the bill, the substance remains the same.”His top deputy, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, also threw cold water on any suggestion the two parties could come together on a narrower voting bill as long as Democrats wanted Congress to overpower the states.“I don’t think there’s anything I’ve seen yet that doesn’t fundamentally change the way states conduct elections,” he said. “It’s sort of a line in the sand for most of our members.”At more than 800 pages, the For the People Act was remarkably broad. It was first assembled in 2019 as a compendium of long-sought liberal election changes and campaign pledges that had energized Democrats’ anti-corruption campaign platform in the 2018 midterm elections. At the time, Democrats did not control the Senate or the White House, and so the bill served more as a statement of values than a viable piece of legislation..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}When Democrats improbably won control of them, proponents insisted that what had essentially been a messaging bill become a top legislative priority. But the approach was always flawed. Mr. Manchin did not support the legislation, and other Democrats privately expressed concerns over key provisions. State election administrators from both parties said some of its mandates were simply unworkable (Democrats proposed tweaks to alleviate their concerns). Republicans felt little pressure to back a bill of its size and partisan origins.Senator Amy Klobuchar, right, announced that she would use her gavel on the Rules Committee to hold a series of hearings on election issues.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesDemocratic leaders won Mr. Manchin’s vote on Tuesday by agreeing to consider a narrower compromise proposal he drafted in case the debate had proceeded. Mr. Manchin’s alternative would have expanded early and mail-in voting, made Election Day a federal holiday, and imposed new campaign and government ethics rules. But it cut out proposals slammed by Republicans, including one that would have neutered state voter identification laws popular with voters and another to set up a public campaign financing system.Mr. Manchin was not the only Democrat keen on Tuesday to project a sense of optimism and purpose, even as the party’s options dwindled. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, announced she would use her gavel on the Rules Committee to hold a series of hearings on election issues, including a field hearing in Georgia to highlight the state’s restrictive new voting law.Vice President Kamala Harris, who asked to take the lead on voting issues for Mr. Biden, spent the afternoon on Capitol Hill trying to drum up support for the bill and craft some areas of bipartisan compromise. She later presided over the vote.“The fight is not over,” she told reporters afterward.Facing criticism from party activists who accused him of taking too passive a role on the issue, Mr. Biden said he would have more to say on the issue next week but vowed to fight on against the dawning of a “Jim Crow era in the 21st century.”“I’ve been engaged in this work my whole career, and we are going to be ramping up our efforts to overcome again — for the people, for our very democracy,” he said in a statement.But privately, top Democrats in Congress conceded they had few compelling options and dwindling time to act — particularly if they cannot persuade all 50 of their members to scrap the filibuster rule. The Senate will leave later this week for a two-week break. When senators return, Democratic leaders, including Mr. Biden, are eager to quickly shift to consideration of an infrastructure and jobs package that could easily consume the rest of the summer.They have also been advised by Democratic elections lawyers that unless a voting overhaul is signed into law by Labor Day, it stands little chance of taking effect before the 2022 midterm elections.Both the House and the Senate are still expected to vote this fall on another marquee voting bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The bill would put teeth back into a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that made it harder for jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to enact voting restrictions, which was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 2013. While it does have some modest Republican support, it too appears to be likely doomed by the filibuster.“This place can always make you despondent,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “The whole exercise of being a member of this body is convincing yourself to get up another day to convince yourself that the fight is worth engaging in. But yeah, this certainly feels like an existential fight.”Jonathan Weisman More

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      in Elections

      Kamala Harris and a High-Risk, High-Reward Presidential Résumé

      by

      For the vice president, another run at the Oval Office is a near certainty. How her current responsibilities help or hurt that bid is an open question.Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your wrap-up of the week in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.Is Kamala Harris drawing the shortest straws in the White House?This week, President Biden announced that Ms. Harris would lead the administration’s effort to protect voting rights, a task he immediately said would “take a hell of a lot of work.”And on Sunday, Ms. Harris leaves for her first trip abroad, visiting Mexico and Guatemala as part of her mandate to address the root causes of migration from Central America that are contributing to a surge of people trying to cross the United States’ Southern border.The central political question facing Ms. Harris has never been whether she will run for president again. It’s when and how.Yet for a history-making politician with big ambitions, Ms. Harris has adopted an early agenda that has left some Democrats fretting about the future of a politician who is already positioned as a presidential-nominee-in-waiting.Both immigration and voting rights are politically fraught problems with no easy solutions. Democrats’ expansive election legislation has faltered in the Senate, with moderate party lawmakers like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia expressing concerns about the bill.And despite the best efforts of her team, Ms. Harris has become the administration’s face — sometimes quite literally — for the influx of migrants, including tens of thousands of unaccompanied children, at the Southern border.Allies point out that Ms. Harris’s portfolio extends beyond those two high-profile issues. She’s also responsible for expanding broadband internet access, combating vaccine hesitancy, advocating the infrastructure plan, helping women re-enter the work force, highlighting the Black maternal mortality rate and aiding small businesses, among other issues.The allies cite the challenges Mr. Biden took on during his first term as vice president — including leading the White House effort to draw down troops in Iraq and overseeing the implementation of the stimulus bill — and argue that voters reward politicians for tackling hard issues, even if they remain unresolved.And many argue that there are no easy problems in a country still grappling with a devastating pandemic, continued economic uncertainty and a divisive racial reckoning.“These are long-term systemic issues,” said Donna Brazile, a former Democratic Party chairwoman who speaks with Ms. Harris and her team. “She’s defined by what I call real big problems, and problems that require a different kind of leadership to solve.”Of course, “real big problems” also carry a far greater risk of political missteps and policy failures, particularly for a politician who is more polarizing than the president she serves, polls show.Even before she became the first Black female vice president, Ms. Harris emerged as an early target of Republicans, who found it easier to rile up their base with racist and sexist attacks against her than with condemnations of Mr. Biden. In the conservative media, she’s relentlessly defined as an untrustworthy radical, with an unpronounceable name and an anti-American agenda.The false caricature may be having an impact on her image: Tracking polls find Ms. Harris’s approval rating hovering a few percentage points lower than Mr. Biden’s, with more voters expressing negative views of her performance.Aides to Ms. Harris have quietly placed some of the blame for the politically damaging situation on Mr. Biden, according to some Democrats outside the White House. The president announced her new diplomatic assignment by telling reporters before a March meeting on immigration at the White House that the vice president would “lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”Ms. Harris’s staff spent weeks explaining that her job was not to reform the country’s immigration system but a narrowly focused foreign policy mission. That distinction is difficult to draw, given the interconnected nature of global migration.And it seems to have been lost on Republicans, who see the situation at the border as one of their most potent lines of attack against a relatively popular administration. They’ve spent weeks falsely calling her Mr. Biden’s “border czar,” releasing #BidenBorderCrisis videos and calling on the vice president to visit the southern border, which she will fly over this weekend on her way to meetings in Central America.But there are some indications that behind the scenes, Ms. Harris pushed for leadership roles on these charged policy issues.After the election, some allies of Ms. Harris’s urged her to take on immigration, according to people who have spoken with her team, even though the issue has long been so intractable that the last president to pass significant legislation addressing it was Ronald Reagan. And the vice president personally asked Mr. Biden if she could spearhead the administration’s fight against Republicans’ new voting restrictions, as an extension of her past work as a senator and the attorney general of California on a problem she believes threatens the underpinnings of American democracy.Yet in the Senate, Ms. Harris was not known for her close relationships with moderates like Mr. Manchin. It’s unclear if she will be able to broker the kind of compromises within her party that will be necessary to pass a voting rights bill. And given the lack of Republican support, little is likely to happen on the bill unless Democrats agree to abolish the filibuster, which several moderates oppose.Beyond legislation, her influence is limited. In the states, Republicans have made the passing of laws that restrict voting an early litmus test for their party. While the Justice Department can bring litigation against voter-suppression measures, Ms. Harris can’t been seen as pressuring the agency to do so. Filling judicial vacancies with pro-voting judges could help stop some of the state laws, but that is a role that falls to Congress and Mr. Biden.Still, there may be political upside for Ms. Harris in taking on voting rights. Voting rights advocates have expressed frustration at what they see as the administration’s tepid approach to countering voter suppression and the prospect that it could hamper Democrats’ ability to win elections in 2022 and beyond.Ms. Harris can travel the country rallying her party’s base, particularly voters of color who are the backbone of Democratic politics. Allies say her role will extend far beyond the legislative wrangling in the Senate to include meetings with activists, state officials and corporations — building relationships with the kinds of Democrats who can help bolster a presidential bid.“From her perspective, what I would say she’s thinking about is, ‘Look, if we don’t fix this, our democracy is gone,’” said Leah Daughtry, a veteran of Democratic campaigns. “She will be using the power of the bully pulpit of the White House to get people engaged and involved.”But some suggest that Ms. Harris’s portfolio may have more to do with office politics than those of the presidential variety. While Mr. Biden feels comfortable with Ms. Harris, Democrats familiar with the workings of the White House say, some on his team remain skeptical of her loyalty after the divisive primary race. Her agenda, they argue, may simply be the White House version of cleaning up after the office party: What better way to prove her fidelity than by taking on some of the most thankless tasks?“There’s always the long view when you are vice president and you think about the future,” Ms. Brazile said. “But it’s too early. Joe Biden has said he’s running in 2024, and she is a real team player.”Drop us a line!We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com or message me on Twitter at @llerer.By the numbers: 29… That’s the number of days former President Donald J. Trump’s blog existed before being shuttered this week.… SeriouslyThe campaign swag that is worth a thousand words.Thanks for reading. On Politics is your guide to the political news cycle, delivering clarity from the chaos.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      VP Kamala Harris Asked to Lead on Voting Rights, and It's a Challenge

      by

      Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the most extensive elections overhaul in a generation.WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris did not come to her role with a list of demands. She wanted to be a generalist, in large part to learn the political rhythms of a president she was still getting to know. In the first few months of her tenure, some of her portfolio assignments were just that: assignments.But on the matter of protecting voting rights, an issue critically important to President Biden’s legacy, Ms. Harris took a rare step. In a meeting with the president over a month ago, she told him that she wanted to take the lead on the issue.Mr. Biden agreed, two people familiar with the discussions said, and his advisers decided to time the announcement of Ms. Harris’s new role to a speech he delivered on Tuesday in Tulsa, Okla. In his remarks, the president declared the efforts of Republican-led statehouses around the country to make it harder to vote as an “assault on our democracy, ” and said Ms. Harris could help lead the charge against them.He also gave a blunt assessment of the task: “It’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.”Back in Washington, the president’s announcement has not clearly illuminated a path forward for Ms. Harris, whose involvement in the issue stands to become her most politically delicate engagement yet. Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the farthest-reaching elections overhaul in a generation, including a landmark expansion of voting rights that is faltering in the Senate.Her office has not yet announced its plans, aside from calls Ms. Harris held with civil rights activists, including Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a few scheduled meetings with prominent voting rights groups. Her advisers say she will take a wide-ranging approach to the issue by giving speeches, convening stakeholders and using the vice-presidential bully pulpit to raise awareness of the importance of the vote.“The work of voting rights has implications for not just one year down the road or four years down the road but 50 years from now,” Symone D. Sanders, the vice president’s senior adviser and press secretary, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The president understands that and the vice president understands that, and that’s why we will implement a comprehensive strategy.”The voting rights bill faces a more urgent timeline. The vast majority of the party has agreed to make the bill the party’s top legislative priority, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, vowed to put it up for a vote later this month so any changes could be put into effect before the 2022 elections.With just weeks to go, it remains far from clear if it can actually pass. Because Republicans have locked arms in opposition, the only path forward would require all 50 Democrats — plus Ms. Harris, who serves as the tiebreaking vote in an evenly divided Senate — to support not only the substance of the bill, but changing the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to approve major legislation, allowing it to pass with a simple majority instead.A handful of Democratic senators have expressed unease about changing the filibuster, while Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have been more adamant in their opposition.Mr. Biden has already pledged to sign the bill, which the House passed with only Democratic votes this spring. Known as the For the People Act, the bill would overhaul the nation’s elections system by creating new national requirements for early and mail-in voting, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But with the bill all but stalled in the Senate, Mr. Biden has repeatedly expressed concern over its future in his discussions with Democrats.The announcement that Ms. Harris would be working to move the bill forward took many on Capitol Hill by surprise. Ms. Harris and Mr. Schumer spoke on Tuesday — and had plans to hold a follow-up conversation late Wednesday, a White House official said — but it did not appear Mr. Manchin or Ms. Sinema were given a heads up.In a statement, Mr. Schumer said he welcomed Ms. Harris’s help navigating into law an elections overhaul that was “essential to protecting the future of our democracy.”Proponents of the voting legislation took her involvement as a sign that their attempts to build pressure not just on lawmakers, but the White House, were being felt.Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said he welcomed Ms. Harris’s help navigating into law an elections overhaul that was “essential to protecting the future of our democracy.”Erin Scott for The New York Times“It’s an interesting move given the long odds of anything getting passed and signed into law,” said James P. Manley, who served as a senior aide to former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader before Mr. Schumer. “There’s not a lot of cards to play right now, so it shows me they are going to try to raise the public temperature of this thing.”Others pointed out that even though Mr. Biden has decades of experience moving legislation through the Senate, Ms. Harris, the first woman and woman of color to hold her role, comes to the issue with an equally valuable perspective as the country grapples with the ways American policies have marginalized and mistreated Black people.“I think that Vice President Harris herself personifies the need for voting rights to be extended,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, who attended the speech in Tulsa, said in an interview. “When she’s on the phone or walks into an office, we’re looking at the reason we need voting rights.”Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said that the decision to elevate Ms. Harris as the face of the administration’s work on the issue was a pivotal moment for the Biden White House given the number of voter suppression efforts that were moving forward — 389 bills in 48 states and counting, according to a tracker maintained the Brennan Center.“It has been decades since a Democratic White House has made voting rights and democracy reform a central goal,” Mr. Waldman said, but he added, “the clock is ticking.”Ms. Harris’s impact on the hand-to-hand politics of the Senate is expected to be limited, but she often drew attention to voting rights during her four years as a senator. During her last year in the Senate, Ms. Harris introduced legislation that would expand election security measures, require each state to have early in-person voting periods and allow for an expansion of mail-in absentee ballots.In 2020, Ms. Harris was also a co-sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore a piece of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that relied on a formula to identify states with a history of discrimination and require that those jurisdictions clear any changes to their voting processes with the federal government. The protections were eliminated by the Supreme Court in 2013.Still, Ms. Harris, who spent a chunk of her time in the Senate running for president, was not known for building especially close relationships with colleagues, and Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema are no exceptions.Several Democratic aides who work closely with the senators scoffed on Wednesday at the idea that Ms. Harris, known as a staunch liberal, would be the one to persuade either moderate lawmaker to change the filibuster rule. Nor is Ms. Harris a likely candidate to broker the kind of compromise on the substance of the bill needed to persuade Mr. Manchin, the only Democrat who has not sponsored it, to back it.Ms. Harris’s attempts in February to nudge Mr. Manchin to back the White House’s proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package are illustrative.Mr. Manchin was piqued when Ms. Harris appeared, without warning, on a television affiliate in West Virginia to promote the package before he backed it. Though a Democratic aide familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly, said the episode was now “water under the bridge,” it prompted cleanup by top White House officials.Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema’s offices declined to comment about Ms. Harris’s new role.Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are doing their best to kill the bill and blunt any Democratic attempt to change the filibuster rule, which would leave their party powerless to stop the passage of sweeping liberal priorities well beyond voting rights.At an event in his home state on Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, argued that Democrats were inflating the impact of new state voting laws in an attempt to justify an unwarranted and chaotic slew of top-down changes to the way states run elections.“What is going on is the Democrats are trying to convince the Senate that states are involved in trying to prevent people from voting in order to pass a total federal takeover in how we conduct elections,” he told reporters. He said “not a single member” of his party supported the bill.Aware of the daunting path ahead, allies of the White House said that shepherding the bill through Congress was only one piece of the effort. Ms. Harris could be useful in helping ratchet up pressure on private companies, working with civil rights organizations, and engaging local communities over the importance of registering to vote.“She understands the need to engage in what I’d like to call kind of an ‘all of the above approach,’” said Representative Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. “We can’t take anything for granted when we’re talking about having people’s voice heard at the ballot box.” More

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      in Elections

      Harris Asked to Lead on Voting Rights, and It's a Challenge

      by

      Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the most extensive elections overhaul in a generation.WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris did not come to her role with a list of demands. She wanted to be a generalist, in large part to learn the political rhythms of a president she was still getting to know. In the first few months of her tenure, some of her portfolio assignments were just that: assignments.But on the matter of protecting voting rights, an issue critically important to President Biden’s legacy, Mr. Harris took a rare step. In a meeting with the president over a month ago, she told him that she wanted to take the lead on the issue.Mr. Biden agreed, two people familiar with the discussions said, and his advisers decided to time the announcement of Ms. Harris’s new role to a speech he delivered on Tuesday in Tulsa, Okla. In his remarks, the president declared the efforts of Republican-led statehouses around the country to make it harder to vote as an “assault on our democracy, ” and said Ms. Harris could help lead the charge against them.He also gave a blunt assessment of the task: “It’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.”Back in Washington, the president’s announcement has not clearly illuminated a path forward for Ms. Harris, whose involvement in the issue stands to become her most politically delicate engagement yet. Her new role comes as the Senate enters a crucial month in the Democratic drive to enact the farthest-reaching elections overhaul in a generation, including a landmark expansion of voting rights that is faltering in the Senate.Her office has not yet announced its plans, aside from calls Ms. Harris held with civil rights activists, including Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a few scheduled meetings with prominent voting rights groups. Her advisers say she will take a wide-ranging approach to the issue by giving speeches, convening stakeholders and using the vice-presidential bully pulpit to raise awareness of the importance of the vote.“The work of voting rights has implications for not just one year down the road or four years down the road but 50 years from now,” Symone Sanders, the vice president’s senior adviser and press secretary, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The president understands that and the vice president understands that, and that’s why we will implement a comprehensive strategy.”The voting rights bill faces a more urgent timeline. The vast majority of the party has agreed to make the bill the party’s top legislative priority, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, vowed to put it up for a vote later this month so any changes could be put into effect before the 2022 elections.With just weeks to go, it remains far from clear if it can actually pass. Because Republicans have locked arms in opposition, the only path forward would require all 50 Democrats — plus Ms. Harris, who serves as the tiebreaking vote in an evenly divided Senate — to support not only the substance of the bill, but changing the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to approve major legislation, allowing it to pass with a simple majority instead.A handful of Democratic senators have expressed unease about changing the filibuster, while Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, have been more adamant in their opposition.Mr. Biden has already pledged to sign the bill, which the House passed with only Democratic votes this spring. Known as the For the People Act, the bill would overhaul the nation’s elections system by creating new national requirements for early and mail-in voting, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But with the bill all but stalled in the Senate, Mr. Biden has repeatedly expressed concern over its future in his discussions with Democrats.The announcement that Ms. Harris would be working to move the bill forward took many on Capitol Hill by surprise. Ms. Harris and Mr. Schumer spoke on Tuesday — and had plans to hold a follow-up conversation late Wednesday, a White House official said — but it did not appear Mr. Manchin or Ms. Sinema were given a heads up.In a statement, Mr. Schumer said he welcomed Ms. Harris’s help navigating into law an elections overhaul that was “essential to protecting the future of our democracy.”Proponents of the voting legislation took her involvement as a sign that their attempts to build pressure not just on lawmakers, but the White House, were being felt.Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said he welcomed Ms. Harris’s help navigating into law an elections overhaul that was “essential to protecting the future of our democracy.”Erin Scott for The New York Times“It’s an interesting move given the long odds of anything getting passed and signed into law,” said James P. Manley, who served as a senior aide to former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader before Mr. Schumer. “There’s not a lot of cards to play right now, so it shows me they are going to try to raise the public temperature of this thing.”Others pointed out that even though Mr. Biden has decades of experience moving legislation through the Senate, Ms. Harris, the first woman and woman of color to hold her role, comes to the issue with an equally valuable perspective as the country grapples with the ways American policies have marginalized and mistreated Black people.“I think that Vice President Harris herself personifies the need for voting rights to be extended,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, who attended the speech in Tulsa, said in an interview. “When she’s on the phone or walks into an office, we’re looking at the reason we need voting rights.”Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said that the decision to elevate Ms. Harris as the face of the administration’s work on the issue was a pivotal moment for the Biden White House given the number of voter suppression efforts that were moving forward — 389 bills in 48 states and counting, according to a tracker maintained the Brennan Center.“It has been decades since a Democratic White House has made voting rights and democracy reform a central goal,” Mr. Waldman said, but he added, “the clock is ticking.”Ms. Harris’s impact on the hand-to-hand politics of the Senate is expected to be limited, but she often drew attention to voting rights during her four years as a senator. During her last year in the Senate, Ms. Harris introduced legislation that would expand election security measures, require each state to have early in-person voting periods and allow for an expansion of mail-in absentee ballots.In 2020, Ms. Harris was also a co-sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore a piece of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that relied on a formula to identify states with a history of discrimination and require that those jurisdictions clear any changes to their voting processes with the federal government. The protections were eliminated by the Supreme Court in 2013.Still, Ms. Harris, who spent a chunk of her time in the Senate running for president, was not known for building especially close relationships with colleagues, and Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema are no exceptions.Several Democratic aides who work closely with the senators scoffed on Wednesday at the idea that Ms. Harris, known as a staunch liberal, would be the one to persuade either moderate lawmaker to change the filibuster rule. Nor is Ms. Harris a likely candidate to broker the kind of compromise on the substance of the bill needed to persuade Mr. Manchin, the only Democrat who has not sponsored it, to back it.Ms. Harris’s attempts in February to nudge Mr. Manchin to back the White House’s proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package is illustrative.Mr. Manchin was piqued when Ms. Harris appeared, without warning, on a television affiliate in West Virginia to promote the package before he backed it. Though a Democratic aide familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly, said the episode was now “water under the bridge” it prompted cleanup by top White House officials.Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema’s offices declined to comment about Ms. Harris’s new role.Senate Republicans, meanwhile, are doing their best to kill the bill and blunt any Democratic attempt to change the filibuster rule, which would leave their party powerless to stop the passage of sweeping liberal priorities well beyond voting rights.At an event in his home state on Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, argued that Democrats were inflating the impact of new state voting laws in an attempt to justify an unwarranted and chaotic slew of top-down changes to the way states run elections.“What is going on is the Democrats are trying to convince the Senate that states are involved in trying to prevent people from voting in order to pass a total federal takeover in how we conduct elections,” he told reporters. He said “not a single member” of his party supported the bill.Aware of the daunting path ahead, allies of the White House said that shepherding the bill through Congress was only one piece of the effort. Ms. Harris could be useful in helping ratchet up pressure on private companies, working with civil rights organizations, and engaging local communities over the importance of registering to vote.“She understands the need to engage in what I’d like to call kind of an ‘all of the above approach,’” said Representative Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. “We can’t take anything for granted when we’re talking about having people’s voice heard at the ballot box.” More

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      Beneath Joe Biden’s Folksy Demeanor, a Short Fuse and an Obsession With Details

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      As Mr. Biden settles into the office he has chased for more than three decades, aides say he demands hours of debate from scores of policy experts.WASHINGTON — The commander in chief was taking his time, as usual.It was late March, and President Biden was under increasing pressure to penalize President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for election interference and the biggest cyberattack ever on American government and industry. “I have to do it relatively soon,” he said to Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser. More