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      Warnock urges Biden to prioritize fight against voter suppression

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe Georgia Democratic senator the Rev Raphael Warnock delivered a challenge to Joe Biden on Sunday to prioritize the fight against voter suppression, telling the US president: “We have to pass voting rights no matter what.”Controversial legislation introducing sweeping new restrictions on voting was signed into law by Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, last week, the spearhead of an apparent effort by Republicans in dozens of states to dramatically curtail access to the electoral process for Black and other minority voters, who lean Democrat.The president has slammed Georgia’s move as “un-American” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century,” a reference to laws enforcing racial segregation following the civil war.But some supporters are worried that his fledgling administration appears more concerned about passing a $3tn economic package focused on infrastructure than tackling what Warnock calls “an assault on democracy”.“We’ve got to work on the infrastructure of our country, our roads and our bridges, and we’ve got to work on the infrastructure of our democracy,” Warnock told CNN’s State of the Union.Two pieces of proposed legislation currently before Congress would counter the Republicans’ voter suppression strategy.The John Lewis Voting Rights Act that Warnock addressed in his first speech on the Senate floor in January would allow courts to block new election legislation by states perceived to violate federal law and impose greater federal oversight on the electoral process.The second, the For the People Act that has already passed the House, would require states to provide at least 15 days of early voting, allow universal access to mail-in voting, permit election day voter registration and create a national holiday for voting.Both bills face an uncertain fate in the US Senate, which has created a furious debate over whether Democrats should remove the filibuster and eliminate the 60-vote requirement for passage.Biden on Sunday urged Congress to pass the two bills, tweeting: “We need to make it easier for all eligible Americans to access the ballot box and prevent attacks on the sacred right to vote.”I urge Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We need to make it easier for all eligible Americans to access the ballot box and prevent attacks on the sacred right to vote.— President Biden (@POTUS) March 28, 2021
      The backlash in Georgia was immediate to Kemp’s Thursday afternoon signing of the legislation that imposes stricter ID voter requirements, limits the availability of ballot drop boxes and shortens the time for voters to request and return mail-in ballots.A Black Democratic state assembly member, Park Cannon, was arrested by Georgia state troopers for knocking on Kemp’s locked door while the signing took place in private. Demonstrators took to the streets of Atlanta on Saturday to support Park.Meanwhile, the editorial board of the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper accused state leaders of “marching backward into history”.“People … will see these voting access restrictions for what they really are: a house built hurriedly on shifting sands of lies. Verifiable facts or statistics are not part of the foundation for the unwarranted package of changes rapidly signed into law Thursday behind closed doors,” the editorial stated, referring to Donald Trump’s false allegations of fraud in the presidential election in Georgia.Nikema Williams, a Black newly elected US congresswoman for Georgia, told CNN on Sunday she believed that the victories of the state’s new Democratic US senators, Warnock and Jon Ossoff, following Biden’s November defeat of Trump in a traditionally red state, had fueled a desire for revenge.“Republicans are pushing back and they’re upset that we were able to win,” she said. “And so they’re going to do everything in their power right now to restrict access to people who mainly look like me from voting.”Kemp incurred the former president’s wrath in December for failing to support his lies about a stolen election, but has since stated he would back Trump for another White House run in 2024.Kemp sparked outrage last week by signing the new state legislation in front of a painting of a slavery-era plantation building, and surrounded only by white men.“I gasped,” Kimberley Wallace, whose family members labored at the plantation for generations, dating back to sharecropping and slavery, told CNN. She said the moment was “very rude and very disrespectful to me, to my family, to Black people of Georgia”. More

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      Republicans have taken up the politics of bigotry, putting US democracy at risk | Robert Reich

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      Republicans are outraged – outraged! – at the surge of migrants at the southern border. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration”. The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs claims, “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”Donald Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which can be done in a matter of weeks – they should never have stopped it. They are causing death and human tragedy.”“Our country is being destroyed!” he adds.In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the border.US Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28% more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal. Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31% during the same period. Three years ago, it was about 25% from February to March. Migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.To be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by US policies over the years, that drives migration in the first place.But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.The core message of the Republican party now consists of liesRepublicans continue to allege – without proof – that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented migrants. Over the past six weeks they’ve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people and Hispanic Americans, all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots, reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote.To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill, the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering and keeps dark money out of elections. It passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.On Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill would register millions of undocumented migrants to vote and accused Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.The core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of violent migrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and blatantly anti-democratic demands voting be restricted to counter it.The party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law and human rights.Donald Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.This transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future of democracy everywhere.“I predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.In his maiden speech at the state department on 4 March, Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also happening here in the United States”.The secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican party, but there was no mistaking his subject.“When democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.People around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy around the world for years to come.”That resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or Democrats prevail on voting rights.Not since the years leading up to the civil war has the clash between the nation’s two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American democracy. More

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      Georgia's governor signed 'Jim Crow' voting bill under painting of a slave plantation

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterAs a photo of the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, circulated around the internet, showing the politician signing the sweeping voting restrictions bill while surrounded by other white, male politicians, some Twitter users homed in on a previously undetected detail.The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch created a Twitter thread about a painting of a Georgia plantation that is hanging behind Kemp in the photograph. Writing about the history of the Callaway plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia, Bunch said the place depicted “thrived because of the back-breaking labor of more than 100 slaves who were held in cruel human bondage”.The columnist, who later published an op-ed about the discovery, said the symbolism of Kemp signing a bill that Joe Biden has referred to as “Jim Crow in the 21st century” is no coincidence.The 98-page Election Integrity Act of 2021 has garnered criticism for the additional ID requirements it has added to absentee voting, and making it a crime for many volunteers to hand out water or food within 150 feet of polling precincts.The practice of handing out food and water became popular as a method of keeping exhausted voters in line at precincts where wait times can span hours. The law also places drop boxes inside voting sites. These drop boxes, which have been in place since last year, will only be accessible during early voting hours instead of 24/7.1. You’ve probably seen this picture of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his gaggle of white men signing the state’s voter suppression law — the new, new Jim Crow. But there’s a shocking angle to this story that you haven’t heard. Sit down for this one… pic.twitter.com/edHPmyeoiu— Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) March 26, 2021
      “Brian Kemp and his white henchmen have created an image for our times, in working to continue a tradition of inhumanity and white supremacy that now spans centuries, from the human bondage that took place behind the placid scenery of Brickhouse Road in Wilkes county, to the suppression now hidden behind a phony facade of ‘voter integrity’. This legacy is a crime against humanity, and it cannot stand,” Bunch tweeted.The imagery garnered outrage from other people on Twitter, too.The signing of the Georgia Voter Suppression law yesterday was done under the backdrop of Callaway Plantation in Georgia. Having a bunch of white men under a plantation signing a massive voter suppression bill lets everyone know EXACTLY what they want to have happen. https://t.co/QeXMoPqXQj— ProfB (@AntheaButler) March 26, 2021
      Mounted behind white enslavers’ descendants signing a law to make it hard for Black people to vote is Callaway Plantation, a concentration camp where Callaways forced 319 Black Georgians to work free and build southern wealth that gave these men power they’re trying to maintain. pic.twitter.com/kSvFmOF1gM— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) March 26, 2021
      Thursday’s signing of the law also garnered criticism after a Democratic representative, Park Cannon, was arrested for knocking on the office door as Kemp signed the bill in a closed-door ceremony. More

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      Threats to US voting rights have grown – what's different about this moment?

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,Since I joined the Guardian in 2019 to focus on voting rights, the topic has exploded and moved to the center of the American politics. After focusing on these threats in connection to the 2020 race, this week we launched the next phase of how we’re going to cover these threats, which only have grown since November.Yesterday, we published a story that explains why American democracy is facing a uniquely perilous moment. This story lays out what I think are the most urgent threats: aggressive measures to curtail the right to vote in state legislatures, a supreme court uninterested in defending voting rights, and extreme partisan gerrymandering, expected to take place later this year. These are going to be the pillars of Guardian US’s coverage over the next year.For this piece, I asked many people the same question: what specifically is different about this moment from what we’ve seen in the past? There’s been growing awareness of voter suppression in recent years, but over the last few months, something has changed.I posed this question to Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate who has helped make voter suppression a national conversation. She said that the last 15 years had seen a “slow boil” of voter suppression that was difficult to see if you weren’t closely tracking it. What’s happening now, she said, was something different.“What is so notable about this moment, and so disconcerting, is that they are not hiding. There is no attempt to pretend that the intention is not to restrict votes,” she said. (You can read our full conversation here.)I also spoke with LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, who has spent decades organizing voters in the south, about what it’s like to see such aggressive restrictions after an election that saw record turnout. She pointed out that the US has a long history of suppressing Black voters when they increase their political participation.“We’re in this hamster wheel of doing the work to register to vote. People exercise their vote, particularly Black voters, and then they’re punished for exercising that vote,” she told me.As alarming as things are now, they could be about to get a lot worse. Later this year, lawmakers across the country will begin the process of redrawing electoral districts, something the constitution mandates must happen once every 10 years. While both parties have manipulated this process for political gain, it has gotten out of control in recent years. Advances in technology and sophisticated data allow lawmakers to carefully carve up districts in such a way that they can virtually guarantee re-election.A decade ago, Republicans deployed this process to their extreme advantage, and they are well positioned to control the process again this year. They’ll have even fewer guardrails holding them back from maximizing their partisan advantage when drawing districts – the supreme court said in 2019 that federal courts could do nothing to stop the process. Lawmakers in places with a history of voting discrimination also no longer have to get their maps reviewed for racial discrimination before they go into effect.“Last decade Republicans tried to pack Black voters into districts in the south and claim that they were trying to do it because of the [Voting Rights Act]. Now there’s an open route for [Republicans] to say, ‘Well, we’re putting Black voters into districts because they’re Democrats.’ And the supreme court has said that’s OK,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center, told me.Democrats have placed a lot of effort into fixing these problems in a sweeping voting rights bill under consideration in Washington. The measure would require independent commissions to draw districts and require early voting as well as automatic and same-day registration, among other things. The Senate held its first hearing on the bill on Wednesday and Republicans are digging in their heels, hard. Passing the bill will probably depend on whether Democrats can get rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation.Also worth watching
      The US slipped, again, in a global ranking of political freedoms, putting it on par with Panama, Romania and Croatia, and Mongolia. Over the last decade, the US has fallen 11 points, from 94 to 83, on the 100-point scale Freedom House, a democracy watchdog, uses to rank political freedoms. “Dropping 11 points is unusual, especially for an established democracy, because they tend to be more stable in our scores,” Sarah Repucci, Freedom House’s vice-president for research and analysis, told me. “Americans should see it as a wake-up call.” More

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      The fight for voting rights in the US: Politics Weekly Extra podcast

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      As Republicans continue to pass bills that would restrict voting rights for many, and as the Democrats try to fight back on the federal level, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund about the importance of the battle for minority voters across the country

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      As Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to pass laws that would lead to voter suppression, Jonathan and Janai discuss the long struggle for voting rights for millions of voters since the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Follow the work of the NAACP LDF here Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Outrage as Georgia Republicans advance bill to restrict voting access

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      Georgia lawmakers have advanced a measure that would significantly curtail voting access after a record number of voters propelled Democratic victories in the 2020 race.The measure scraped through 29-20 in the GOP-controlled Georgia senate, which was the absolute minimum number of votes Republicans needed. Four Republicans, including some in competitive races, sat out the vote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The bill, SB 241, would end the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, a policy that Georgia Republicans implemented in the state in 2005. More than 1.3 million people voted by mail in the 2020 general election in the state. Under the bill only people age 65 and older, or who have one of a handful of state-approved excuses, would be allowed to vote by mail. Just 16 other states currently require a voter to give an excuse to vote by mail.The legislation also would require voters to provide identification information, such as a driver’s license number, both when they apply to vote by mail and when they return the ballot.Republicans have frequently held up the specter of voter fraud to justify such restrictions, though there were several vote recounts in Georgia in the 2020 race, as well as audits, and officials found no such wrongdoing.Mike Dugan, the Republican state senator who sponsored the bill, said the lack of widespread fraud should not be an impediment to changing election rules.“You don’t wait until you have wholesale issues until you try to meet the need,” he said. “You do it beforehand.”He also said on the senate floor Monday that the bill was needed to reduce the burden on local election officials and to ensure that voters were not disenfranchised.State senator Elena Parent, a Democrat, said the justification for the bill was a “weaponization of Trump’s lies” about the election.“It is a willingness and embrace of damage to American democracy,” she said. “The numbers to stop this bill may not be here in this chamber today. But I assure you there are many thousands of Georgians right now whose political spirit is awakened by disgust at modern-day voter suppression.”A stream of Democrats criticized the measure as a thinly veiled effort to suppress Black and other minority voters in Georgia. Those groups contributed to record turnout in the state in 2020 and helped propel Joe Biden, as well as Democrats senatorial candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to stunning victories in the state.“I know racism when I see it,” said Gail Davenport, a Democrat who recalledwatching the Ku Klux Klan marching on Saturdays in Jonesboro, just south of Atlanta. “This is not about the process. This is about suppressing the vote of a certain group of people, especially me, and people who look like me, and I take it personally.”The bill will now go to the Georgia House of Representatives, which last week approved its own set of voting restrictions, including new limits on early voting and dropboxes. It remains unclear which proposals will ultimately be sent to the governor’s desk once each chamber fully considers the opposite chamber’s bill.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterLawmakers have until 31 March to send the bills to Governor Brian Kemp’s desk, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.“In the last two election cycles, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of voters of color who voted by mail, the number of young people who used early voting, the number of African Americans who voted on Saturday and Sunday,” Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, told Mother Jones.“We saw unprecedented levels of turnout across the board. And so every single metric of voter access that has been a good in Georgia is now under attack.”Top Republicans in the state, including Lt Gov Geoff Duncan, have said they oppose efforts to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting and Duncan refused to preside over the senate on Monday as it considered the measure to do just that.At several points during the debate, which stretched around three hours on Monday afternoon, Democrats connected the policies under consideration to those in the Jim Crow south. They noted that some members of the legislature had lived through those policies. Harold Jones II, another Democratic state senator, urged his colleagues to pay attention to Black lawmakers who spoke out against the bill.“It’s because that most basic right was denied to us. It’s not 1800, it’s not [the] 1850s, it’s right here in this room. Many of the senators that sit here lived through that process,” he said. “Let me tell you, it is not theater. It is not a performance. It is real because we live with it every single day.” More

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      Top House Democrat Jim Clyburn: 'No way we'd let filibuster deny voting rights'

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      One of the most powerful Democrats in Washington has issued a frank warning to members of his own party, saying they need to find a way to pass major voting rights legislation or they will lose control of Congress.The comments from Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, came days after the House of Representatives approved a sweeping voting rights bill that would enact some of the most dramatic expansions of the right to vote since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Even though Democrats also control the US Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass the chamber because of a procedural rule, the filibuster, that requires 60 votes to advance legislation.In an interview with the Guardian this week, Clyburn called out two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have opposed getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans across the country are advancing sweeping measures to curtail voting rights and letting expansive voting rights legislation die would harm Democrats, Clyburn said.“There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic,” he said. “If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.”If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rightsClyburn issued that warning ahead of the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when law enforcement officers brutally beat voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama.Clyburn and other House Democrats have been hoping the early days of Joe Biden’s administration will be marked by passage of a bill named after the late congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights hero who was nearly killed on Bloody Sunday. That measure would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, gutted by the supreme court in 2013, that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get election changes cleared by the federal government before they took effect.“Here we are talking about the Voting Rights Act he worked so hard for and that’s named in his honor and they’re going to filibuster it to death? That ain’t gonna happen,” Clyburn said.But the likelihood of that bill becoming law is doubtful under current procedures. Democrats expect Republicans to find a reason to filibuster it after its expected passage through the House of Representatives and consideration in the Senate. Thus Clyburn is calling for some kind of workaround of the filibuster in the current legislative climate, in which the Senate is split 50-50 and use of the legislative obstructing mechanism is all too common.“I’m not going to say that you must get rid of the filibuster. I would say you would do well to develop a Manchin-Sinema rule on getting around the filibuster as it relates to race and civil rights,” Clyburn said.Clyburn said he has not discussed changing the filibuster with Biden, who has expressed support for keeping the filibuster in place.The reality of their slim majority and the regularity of legislation dying through filibuster has caused Democrats to opt to pass the Biden administration’s Covid relief package through a budgetary process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold. Clyburn wants to see the same thing with civil rights.“You can’t filibuster the budget,” Clyburn said. “That’s why we have reconciliation rules. We need to have civil and voting rights reconciliation. That should have had reconciliation permission a long, long time ago.”He noted: “If the headlines were to read that the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act was filibustered to death it would be catastrophic.”Clyburn’s comments underscore the difficulty the federal government has in moving any bill because of arcane legislative roadblocks. Broadly popular proposals like a minimum wage increase or a voting rights bill seem dead on arrival. And that has left veteran Senate Democrats skeptical that even a bill protecting Americans’ rights to vote has a chance. First, the filibuster would have to go, and that seems unlikely at the moment.“The short-term prospects of doing away with the filibuster seem remote just because there aren’t the votes to do that,” said Luke Albee, a former chief of staff to the Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Pat Leahy of Vermont. “My gut is it will take six months, eight months, a year of total obstructionism on the Republican side for senators who are skeptical now of getting rid of the filibuster to at least have a more open mind about it.”Albee also said it was possible that a Voting Rights Act could face strong Republican opposition, despite Clyburn’s confidence.“There’s no one that hopes it passes more than me but I just worry it’s a toxic environment,” Albee added. More

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      Biden's no LBJ but he must protect voting rights. What else is the presidency for? | Robert Reich

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      In 1963, when the newly sworn in Lyndon Baines Johnson was advised against using his limited political capital on the controversial issue of civil and voting rights for Black Americans, he responded: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”The US is again approaching a crucial decision point on the most fundamental right of all in a democracy: the right to vote. The result will either be the biggest advance since LBJ’s landmark civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965, or the biggest setback since the end of Reconstruction and start of Jim Crow in the 1870s.The decisive factor will be President Joe Biden.On one side are Republicans, who control most state legislatures and are using false claims of election fraud to enact an avalanche of voting restrictions on everything from early voting and voting by mail to voter IDs. They also plan to gerrymander their way back to a US House of Representatives majority.After losing the Senate and the presidency, they’re determined to win back power by rigging the rules against Democrats, disproportionately Black and brown voters. As a lawyer for the Arizona Republican party put it baldly before the supreme court, without such restrictions Republicans are “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats”.On the other side are congressional Democrats, advancing the most significant democracy reform legislation since LBJ – a sprawling 791-page For the People Act, establishing national standards for federal elections.The proposed law mandates automatic registration of new voters, voting by mail and at least 15 days of early voting. It bans restrictive voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls, changes studies suggest would increase voter participation, especially by racial minorities. It also requires that congressional redistricting be done by independent commissions and creates a system of public financing for congressional campaigns.The legislation sailed through the House last week, on a party line vote. The showdown will occur in the Senate, where Republicans are determined to kill it. Although Democrats possess a razor-thin majority, the bill doesn’t stand a chance unless Democrats can overcome two big obstacles.The first is the filibuster, requiring 60 votes to pass regular legislation. Notably, the filibuster is not in the constitution and not even in law. It’s a rule that has historically been used against civil rights and voting rights bills, as it was in the 1960s when LBJ narrowly overcame it.Democrats can – and must – finally end the filibuster now, with their 51-vote majority.But if they try, they face a second obstacle. Two Democrats – Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – have said they won’t vote to end the filibuster, presumably because they want to preserve their centrist image and appeal to Republicans in their states. A few other Democrats are lukewarm to the idea.Well, I’m sorry. The stakes are too high. If Democrats fail to enact the For the People Act, Republicans will send voting rights into retreat for decades. There’s no excuse for Manchin and Sinema or any other Senate Democrat letting Republicans pull America backwards towards Jim Crow.And no reason Biden should let them. It’s time for him to assert the kind of leadership LBJ asserted more than a half-century ago on civil and voting rights.Johnson used every tool at his disposal, described by the journalist Mary McGrory as “an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages”.He warned the Georgia senator Richard Russell, a dedicated segregationist: “Dick, I love you and I owe you. But … I’m going to run over you if you challenge me on this civil rights bill.” He demanded his allies join him in pressuring holdouts. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, later Johnson’s vice-president, recalled: “The president grabbed me by my shoulder and damn near broke my arm.”Historians say Johnson’s importuning, bribing and threatening may have shifted the votes of close to a dozen senators, breaking the longest filibuster in history and clearing the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights that could shape America for a half-century or more. Joe Biden is not LBJ, and the times are different from the mid-1960s. But the stakes are as high.Biden must wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, “what the hell’s the presidency for?” More