President Joe Biden and other top Democrats promised to take more action in the future after Senate Republicans blocked a massive election overhaul bill on Tuesday.
As reported by The Daily Wire, “Republican senators shot down an attempt by Democrats on Tuesday to pass an election bill, dubbed the ‘For the People Act,’ that has been widely criticized as partisan.”
After the vote, Schumer spoke on the Senate floor, saying, “I want to be clear about what just happened on the Senate floor. Every single Senate Republican just voted against starting debate — starting debate — on legislation to protect Americans’ voting rights.”
“Once again, the Senate republican minority has launched a partisan blockade of a pressing issue here in the United States Senate, an issue no less fundamental than the right to vote,” Schumer noted.
“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. … But I want to be very clear about one thing: The fight to protect voting rights is not over, by no means,” Schumer added, per The Hill, describing the GOP filibuster as “ridiculous and awful.”
“Make no mistake about it, it will not be the last time voting rights comes up for a debate in the Senate. … We have several serious options for how to reconsider this issue and advance legislation to combat voter suppression. We are going to explore every last one of our options,” Schumer added.
In a statement released Tuesday, Biden, who was criticized by progressives for his perceived silence on the voting rights legislation, said, “I’ll have more to say on this next week. But let me be clear. This fight is far from over—far from over. 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.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), chairwoman of the Rules Committee in the Senate, appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Tuesday night saying that senators are going to take the voting legislation straight to the American people in their next attempts to federally alter election procedures.
Maddow asked Klobuchar, “What’s next?” to which Klobuchar responded, “What’s next? We’re going to Georgia.”
“The Rules Committee has not gone on the road for 20 years, and that is just the beginning because my colleagues maybe should have learned a lesson in Georgia, my Republican colleagues,” she noted, saying that Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) was “the guy who said it all in probably one sentence. This is all summed up that some people don’t want some people to vote.”
“We are not ending this fight,” she added. “And one of the ways we do that is getting out of this Capitol dome and heading out to the states so we can hear from people and so my colleagues can hear them.”
Repeating Democratic talking points on voter laws, Klobuchar added, “it’s hard to hide when you have people talking about standing in 10-hour lines without food and water or people trying to find one drop-off ballot box in the middle of Harris County, Texas, of 5 million people, or the discriminatory voting practices, or six states still requiring notarized signatures from notary publics just to get an application for an absentee ballot.”
As The Daily Wire noted, “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that S-1, the election bill Democrats have been pushing for months, was ‘Democrats’ transparently partisan plan to tilt every election in America permanently in their favor.’”