Julián Castro, former Housing and Urban Development secretary and presidential candidate, used Texas Democrats’ dramatic eleventh-hour walkout Sunday night to re-up calls for the Senate to kill the legislative filibuster and pass voting rights safeguards.
?Texas Democrats have officially blocked the Republican voter suppression bill and spared us time to act.
NOW is the time for the U.S. Senate to end the filibuster and safeguard our democracy before it’s too late.@Sen_JoeManchin and @SenatorSinema, we’re counting on you. https://t.co/1I71bIeaJM
— Julián Castro (@JulianCastro) May 31, 2021
Texas Democrats pulled the gambit to block sweeping voting legislation that would, among other things, shorten early voting hours and add barriers to voting by mail.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said last week that he’d bring S1, the For the People Act, to the floor the week of June 21st. The bill faces slim chances of passing currently, with the 60-vote threshold in place and seemingly no Republican support for the legislation.
Manchin, the only Senate Democrat not currently publicly supporting S1, has advocated for narrower voting rights legislation — though his recent proposal to restore key components of the Voting Rights Act attracted immediate Republican suspicion.
Manchin, and his fellow public filibuster disciple Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), came to their first real test last week when Republicans carried out a filibuster to block a bipartisan bill to establish a January 6 commission.
The two put out a joint statement “imploring” their Republican peers to vote for the commission, and Manchin insisted that there could be 10 Republican yes votes. There, predictably, were not: only six Republicans joined Democrats to try to break the filibuster and advance the bill to the floor for debate.
Sinema didn’t vote at all — she’d already left for the holiday break.
The voting rights push, which Democrats have characterized as critical to safeguard democracy as GOP legislatures launch state-level assaults, is expected to be the next big pressure point for the Democratic filibuster holdouts.
Democratic state legislators are doing yeoman’s work in trying to stem the voter suppression tide, but without federal reinforcements, they are doomed. It’s incredibly frustrating that the right and moral thing to do is absolutely clear, but it comes down to two Senators, purportedly on our own side, who fail to see reality. It’s especially appalling after the failure of the 1/6 commission in the Senate, despite their public imploring of Republicans to step up.
Sinema really needs to be held accountable for her not being there. If the six Republicans could stay and vote their conscience then she should be expected to show up.
I am hoping we get a chance to replace her next primary with an actual democrat.
I’m not willing to say she’s not a Democratic politician, but I haven’t figured out who she is working for, as opposed to who she says she’s working for.
I also just think it’s bad form not to show up and vote, unless of course she had a family emergency. I’ve said before that I don’t think she understands optics, and that the issues that we’re dealing with right now are many, are varied, and that we need all hands on deck.
It feels as if Manchin has been maneuvered into a corner, whether by himself, or by the right wing, or both, where he will either have to support major changes to the filibuster, or become an outcast among Democrats. At this point, it should be impossible for him to believe that the R’s will negotiate any reasonable “moderate” resolution that allows him to keep face.