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      In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril

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      As G.O.P. legislatures move to curtail voting rules, congressional Democrats say authoritarianism looms, but Republicans dismiss the concerns as politics as usual.WASHINGTON — Senator Christopher S. Murphy concedes that political rhetoric in the nation’s capital can sometimes stray into hysteria, but when it comes to the precarious state of American democracy, he insisted he was not exaggerating the nation’s tilt toward authoritarianism.“Democrats are always at risk of being hyperbolic,” said Mr. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “I don’t think there’s a risk when it comes to the current state of democratic norms.”After the norm-shattering presidency of Donald J. Trump, the violence-inducing bombast over a stolen election, the pressuring of state vote counters, the Capitol riot and the flood of voter curtailment laws rapidly being enacted in Republican-run states, Washington has found itself in an anguished state.Almost daily, Democrats warn that Republicans are pursuing racist, Jim Crow-inspired voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise tens of millions of citizens, mainly people of color, in a cynical effort to grab power. Metal detectors sit outside the House chamber to prevent lawmakers — particularly Republicans who have boasted of their intention to carry guns everywhere — from bringing weaponry to the floor. Democrats regard their Republican colleagues with suspicion, believing that some of them collaborated with the rioters on Jan. 6.Republican lawmakers have systematically downplayed or dismissed the dangers, with some breezing over the attack on the Capitol as a largely peaceful protest, and many saying the state voting law changes are to restore “integrity” to the process, even as they give credence to Mr. Trump’s false claims of rampant fraud in the 2020 election.They shrug off Democrats’ warnings of grave danger as the overheated language of politics as usual.“I haven’t understood for four or five years why we are so quick to spin into a place where part of the country is sure that we no longer have the strength to move forward, as we always have in the past,” said Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of Republican leadership, noting that the passions of Republican voters today match those of Democratic voters after Mr. Trump’s triumph. “Four years ago, there were people in the so-called resistance showing up in all of my offices every week, some of whom were chaining themselves to the door.”For Democrats, the evidence of looming catastrophe mounts daily. Fourteen states, including politically competitive ones like Florida and Georgia, have enacted 22 laws to curtail early and mail-in ballots, limit polling places and empower partisans to police polling, then oversee the vote tally. Others are likely to follow, including Texas, with its huge share of House seats and electoral votes.Because Republicans control the legislatures of many states where the 2020 census will force redistricting, the party is already in a strong position to erase the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the House. Even moderate voting-law changes could bolster Republicans’ chances for the net gain of one vote they need to take back the Senate.And in the nightmare outcome promulgated by some academics, Republicans have put themselves in a position to dictate the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if the voting is close in swing states.“Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations,” 188 scholars said in a statement expressing concern about the erosion of democracy.Demonstrators protesting new voting legislation in Atlanta this month. Fourteen states, including Georgia, have enacted laws to restrict practices like early voting. Brynn Anderson/Associated PressSenator Angus King, an independent from Maine who lectured on American politics at Bowdoin College before going to the Senate, put the moment in historical context. He called American democracy “a 240-year experiment that runs against the tide of human history,” and that tide usually leads from and back to authoritarianism.He said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the troubling curtailments of the franchise.“This is an incredibly dangerous moment, and I don’t think it’s being sufficiently realized as such,” he said.Republicans contend that much of this is overblown, though some concede the charges sting. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said Democrats were playing a hateful race card to promote voting-rights legislation that is so extreme it would cement Democratic control of Congress for decades.“I hope that damage isn’t being done,” he added, “but it is always very dangerous to falsely play the race card and let’s face it, that’s what’s being done here.”Mr. Toomey, who voted to convict Mr. Trump at his second impeachment trial, said he understood why, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, states sharply liberalized voting rules in 2020, extending mail-in voting, allowing mailed ballots to be counted days after Election Day and setting up ballot drop boxes, curbside polls and weeks of early voting.But he added that Democrats should understand why state election officials wanted to course correct now that the coronavirus was ebbing.“Every state needs to strike a balance between two competing values: making it as easy as possible to cast legitimate votes, but also the other, which is equally important: having everybody confident about the authenticity of the votes,” Mr. Toomey said.Mr. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, he added, “were more likely to resonate because you had this system that went so far the other way.”Some other Republicans embrace the notion that they are trying to use their prerogatives as a minority party to safeguard their own power. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said the endeavor was the essence of America’s system of representative democracy, distinguishing it from direct democracy, where the majority rules and is free to trample the rights of the minority unimpeded.“The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” Mr. Paul said. “The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.”Democrats and their allies push back hard on those arguments. Mr. King said the only reason voters lacked confidence in the voting system was that Republicans — especially Mr. Trump — told them for months that it was rigged, despite all evidence to the contrary, and now continued to insist that there were abuses in the process that must be fixed.“That’s like pleading for mercy as an orphan after you killed both your parents,” he said.Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the troubling curtailments of the franchise.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesSenator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said in no way could some of the new state voting laws be seen as a necessary course correction. “Not being able to serve somebody water who’s waiting in line? I mean, come on,” he said. “There are elements that are in most of these proposals where you look at it and you say, ‘That violates the common-sense test.’”Missteps by Democrats have fortified Republicans’ attempts to downplay the dangers. Some of them, including President Biden, have mischaracterized Georgia’s voting law, handing Republicans ammunition to say that Democrats were willfully distorting what was happening at the state level.The state’s 98-page voting law, passed after the narrow victories for Mr. Biden and two Democratic candidates for Senate, would make absentee voting harder and create restrictions and complications for millions of voters, many of them people of color.But Mr. Biden falsely claimed that the law — which he labeled “un-American” and “sick” — had slapped new restrictions on early voting to bar people from voting after 5 p.m. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said the Georgia law had ended early voting on Sunday. It didn’t.And the sweep — critics say overreach — of the Democrats’ answer to Republican voter laws, the For the People Act, has undermined Democratic claims that the fate of the republic relies on its passage. Even some Democrats are uncomfortable with the act’s breadth, including an advancement of statehood for the District of Columbia with its assurance of two more senators, almost certainly Democratic; its public financing of elections; its nullification of most voter identification laws; and its mandatory prescriptions for early and mail-in voting.“They want to put a thumb on the scale of future elections,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on Wednesday. “They want to take power away from the voters and the states, and give themselves every partisan advantage that they can.”Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, who could conceivably be a partner in Democratic efforts to expand voting rights, called the legislation a “fundamentally unserious” bill.Republican leaders have sought to take the current argument from the lofty heights of history to the nitty-gritty of legislation. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, pointed to the success of bipartisan efforts such as passage of a bill to combat hate crimes against Asian Americans, approval of a broad China competition measure and current talks to forge compromises on infrastructure and criminal justice as proof that Democratic catastrophizing over the state of American governance was overblown.But Democrats are not assuaged.“Not to diminish the importance of the work we’ve done here, but democracy itself is what we’re talking about,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii. “And to point at other bills that don’t have to do with the fair administration of elections is just an attempt to distract while all these state legislatures move systematically toward disenfranchising voters who have historically leaned Democrat.”Mr. King said he had had serious conversations with Republican colleagues about the precarious state of American democracy. Authoritarian leaders like Vladimir V. Putin, Viktor Orban and Adolf Hitler have come to power by election, and stayed in power by warping or obliterating democratic norms.But, he acknowledged, he has yet to get serious engagement, largely because his colleagues fear the wrath of Mr. Trump and his supporters.“I get the feeling they hope this whole thing will go away,” he said. “They make arguments, but you have the feeling their hearts aren’t in it.” More

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      How Joe Manchin Can Fix the Filibuster

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      It’s easy to sympathize with the liberal desire to bury the Senate filibuster forever. The 60-vote threshold for Senate legislation is a choke point in a political system defined by gridlock, sclerosis and futility. It provides an excuse for policy abdication, encouraging the legislative branch to cede authority to the presidency and the courts, and the Republican Party to decline to have a policy agenda at all. Its history is checkered, its pervasive use is a novelty of polarization, and its eventual disappearance seems inevitable — so why not adapt now? More

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      How Democrats Should Approach the Midterm Elections

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      Since most of us are sleeping better in the quietude of a sane presidency, it’s tempting to ignore the current craziness of the Republican Party. Between the QAnon wackos, the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, the voter suppression hard-liners, the coup enthusiasts and the election deniers, the party is showing a mash-up of madness.But here’s the scariest part of all that: They’re still likely to take the House next year during the midterm elections, and possibly the Senate, as they continue to rewrite rules in several states to make it easier to compromise fair elections.That means the Biden presidency, though riding high on a popular economic agenda and public health competence, may turn out to be a brief, single-term calm between two storms of authoritarianism.Democrats can blame themselves, in part. They’ve given just enough ammunition to Republicans that a party waging war on democracy is on the cusp of undermining much of that democracy next year.The Republican tank of ideas is full of the tired and the preposterous. Cut taxes for the wealthy. Climate change is fake. Make voting harder. And the big unifier: The 2020 presidential election was stolen. Try finding a national majority for any of that. So the Republican Party will run on what the Democrats have given them. Or at least what the far left of the party has given them.“G.O.P. candidates in 2022 will happily accuse Democratic opponents of wanting to defund the police and teach contempt for the country in schools,” wrote James A. Baker III, a venerable party operative, sketching a rosy scenario in The Wall Street Journal. It’s a powerful one-two punch: Dems will make us less safe while preaching identity politics to the kids.Republicans already control a majority of statehouses, and with them, the redistricting process. They need a net gain of only five seats to take the House, and a lone pickup to get control of the Senate.The warning signs were there in 2020, and in a recent local election in which Democrats lost in a Latino-heavy part of Texas. Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than seven million, but Democrats suffered a net loss of 11 House seats.In a post-mortem, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the New York Democrat overseeing his party’s congressional campaigns, told The Washington Post that the “lies and distortions about defund and socialism carried a punch.”The way to hold off the barbarians on the right should be pretty simple. A unified Democratic message — helping people live better lives with a targeted hand from government — is hugely popular. It’s the essence of both the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act and Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill. And it should be the essence of what voters think about when they think about Democrats.Another message, on cultural issues, is much less popular. In a recent congressional race for an open seat in New Mexico, Democrats won in a landslide by emphasizing economic fairness while directly confronting attacks on law and order. The winner, Melanie Stansbury, ran an ad that featured support from a former sheriff’s deputy.The rise in violent crime is now the top concern of many voters across the country, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey, and in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, according to a recent poll by Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos. Polling also shows that a majority of Americans oppose defunding the police, and Maloney says it’s a “pernicious lie” to label Democrats as the party of defund. But lies, fueled by lefty overreach in some cities as well as social media amplification, tend to have a much longer shelf life than boring talk about infrastructure.On race, the great reckoning that began with George Floyd’s death last year should continue to expose the overlooked lowlights of history and work to get rid of the bias built into the system.But in promoting the teaching of critical race theory — a term so misunderstood that it’s best known now as a Republican weapon — some educators have played into the hands of the Trumpers, even those less talented in the dark art of demagoguery. At the annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner in New Hampshire in early June, former Vice President Mike Pence said that children are being taught “to be ashamed of their skin color,” a popular Republican talking point.If the message is that being born white is something akin to the Roman Catholic concept of original sin, then there’s bound to be a backlash among the moderate voters who came around to Democrats in the Trump era.The longtime liberal strategist Ruy Teixeira warned of this very thing in his newsletter in May and said moderates are afraid to push back. “The administration is doing nothing to head off this impending culture war in the schools because to do so would bring the wrath of the stridently woke sector of the Democratic Party down upon Biden’s head,” he wrote.Trump is diminished but still very dangerous. His party is stocked with brick-headed deniers. Nearly three in 10 Republicans said they think he will be reinstated in the White House this year. This month, Trump called his defeat “the crime of the century” and got applause when he denounced critical race theory.Democrats won’t be able to contain the tornado of awfulness around Trump with the “stridently woke,” in Teixeira’s words. Common-sense politics may not be a rallying cry, but it wins elections.Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing Opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and the author of, most recently, “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Three Paths to Containing Trump

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      Last fall and winter, the president of the United States attempted, with ineffectual strategy but violent consequences, to pressure Republicans to overturn an election that he quite clearly lost. Now he reportedly believes that swing-state “audits” will somehow reinstall him in the White House by the end of summer. Many of the courtiers who encouraged his earlier delusions are still busily at work; one of them, Michael Flynn, recently suggested (before backpedaling) that the United States needed a Myanmar-style military coup. More

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      In Delaware, Biden Indulges One of His Oldest Habits: Commuting

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      Still adjusting to the White House, the president sees Delaware as a place where he can be on display but still have his privacy protected.REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — Everyone here has a Biden story.Joe Mack, who owns the Double Dippers ice cream parlor, says President Biden likes to recite old Irish sayings when he comes in to grab a quart of chocolate chip. Susan Kehoe, the owner of Browseabout Books, says Mr. Biden and his dog Champ draw crowds of onlookers when they relax on one of the benches outside the store.Kathleen McGuiness, the Delaware state auditor, has a photograph on her phone of her standing next to an aviators-wearing Mr. Biden near Rehoboth Avenue, the town’s main drag.“They fit into the fabric,” Ms. McGuiness said of the president and his brood, who summered here for years before Mr. Biden bought a $2.7 million beach home in 2017 in the North Shores, a tony neighborhood one mile north of town.Before the 2020 election, the Bidens were often a fixture downtown, the former vice president often tangling up people in conversations that sometimes had no end in sight.“He wandered freely,” Mr. Mack said.As president, Mr. Biden has made it clear with public comments — he has compared life in the White House to living in a “gilded cage” — and the frequency of his travel that he is still most comfortable in Delaware, a place where he can be on display and protected all at once.The Bidens own a large home in a suburb of Wilmington, but Rehoboth, a laid-back beach town that sells French fries by the bucket and Biden-theme merchandise — including orange Gatorade-scented candles, crafted in homage to the president’s preferred drink — is one of his favorite havens. In the middle of tense negotiations with Republicans over an infrastructure package, mushrooming ransomware attacks against American companies, and plans for a coming trip to the Group of 7 summit in Europe, Mr. Biden departed for the beach to celebrate the 70th birthday of Jill Biden, the first lady.Mr. Biden’s inclination to go home to Delaware is longstanding: During his 36 years in the Senate, Mr. Biden made it a point to travel back to Wilmington to spend most evenings with his sons, a habit that began after his first wife, Neilia Biden, and young daughter, Naomi Biden, were killed in a car accident.At least for now, the Bidens have another reason: They do not yet fully trust the residence staff and security officials they did not directly hire, according to two people familiar with their thinking. (Many of the household employees are holdovers from the previous administration, which is common for new presidents.) The Bidens still have not installed a White House chief usher, who manages the residence. The Trumps’ chief usher, who was a former rooms manager of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, was fired on Inauguration Day.Eric Johnson, a native of Rehoboth, with a cutout likeness of Mr. Biden. The town is one of the president’s favorite havens.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFor the Bidens, the White House has taken some adjustment. Delaware, on the other hand, takes almost none. Their home in Rehoboth was purchased after the president promised his wife that he would buy her a beach house with proceeds from a multimillion-dollar book deal signed after he left the vice presidency. (A plaque above the front door reads “A Promise Kept.”)“I wanted it to be the kind of place where you can come in in your wet bathing suit and bare feet and I can just take the broom and brush out the sand,” Dr. Biden told Vogue in 2020. “And that’s what this is. Everything’s easy.”On Thursday, a bike ride the couple took at the state park near their home stretched much longer than expected because the president kept stopping to talk to people, according to a person familiar with their activities. The first couple kept a low profile, though the townspeople were comparing notes about where the first couple might turn up.At DiFebo’s, an Italian restaurant that is a favorite of Mr. Biden’s, patrons hoped the president would drop in for his favorite dish, chicken Parmesan with red sauce. (The first lady usually orders the salmon.) At the Ice Cream Store, a parlor near the boardwalk, tubs of Biden’s Summer White House Cherry sat waiting for consumption.Not this visit. On a wooded lane in the neighborhood where Mr. Biden lives, law enforcement officials in black S.U.V.s restricted the flow of traffic. A Coast Guard ship in the ocean and the sight of burly Secret Service agents in summer wear were the only giveaways that the president was even in town.When Mr. Biden and Dr. Biden returned to the capital, it was a rare reversal of a typical week for them. Aside from the trip this week to Rehoboth — his first as president — Mr. Biden has spent nine weekends at his home in Wilmington, and five at Camp David, the Maryland presidential retreat, according to a review of his schedule. Mr. Biden has swapped the train for Air Force One, sometimes leaving Washington on short notice for even shorter trips: Last week, he flew back to Wilmington for the afternoon to attend the funeral of a longtime aide.Mr. Biden arrived in Rehoboth Beach via helicopter this week. He bought a home in Rehoboth after he promised Ms. Biden that he would purchase a beach house with proceeds from a multimillion-dollar book deal signed after he left the vice presidency.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesNaturally, the fact that Mr. Biden enjoys coming back to Delaware — even in the middle of a presidential workweek — did not seem to surprise residents here.“I think he knows his way around Washington and he’s pretty familiar with what he needs to do and where he needs to be,” Ms. McGuiness, who has known the Bidens for years — her sister used to babysit for the family — said in an interview. “Making a quick travel to the Wilmington home or Rehoboth home makes sense for someone who puts family as a priority.”Mr. Biden’s trip this week to Rehoboth was his first as president, and he has spent nine weekends at his home in Wilmington, and five at Camp David, according to a review of his schedule. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe first lady often spends less time in Washington during the week than Mr. Biden does. Before his travel weekends, Dr. Biden sometimes heads separately to one of the family homes in Delaware, or meets up with extended family at Camp David. She has also traveled alone to Rehoboth. Ms. Kehoe, the owner of Browseabout Books, said the Bidens were generally treated as part of the scenery.“We try to treat them as if they were any other customer,” Ms. Kehoe said. “Which is a good thing for us.”Convention suggests that presidents should stay close to Washington and be judicious with taxpayer-funded travel, but that concept was tested to its limit with President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump spent over 417 days at one of his properties, a travel habit that blurred the line between his family business and presidential duties. Mr. Trump enjoyed the perks of being president, including the staff, the ceremonies, the planes and the presidential limo. Many of those perks are long familiar to Mr. Biden — he had a similar apparatus around him for eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president — but he has said the trappings that come with the presidency have made him uncomfortable.“I don’t know about you all, but I was raised in the way that you didn’t look for anybody to wait on you,” Mr. Biden said of life in the White House during a town-hall-style interview with CNN in February. “I find myself extremely self-conscious.”A Secret Service agent and a Delaware State Police officer on the beach. During his 36 years in the Senate, Mr. Biden made it a point to travel back to Wilmington to spend most evenings with his sons.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times More

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      Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin’s Nihilistic Bipartisanship

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      We are in the eye of the storm of American democratic collapse. There is, outwardly, a feeling of calm. The Biden administration is competent and placid. The coronavirus emergency is receding nationally, if not internationally. Donald Trump, once the most powerful man on earth and the emperor of the news cycle, is now a failed blogger under criminal investigation. More

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

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      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