Washington | The journey is symbolically fraught and politically fraught: Joe Biden promised Tuesday in Georgia to do his best to reform US electoral law, in order to protect the access of minorities, especially African Americans, to the polls.
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To do so, a senior White House official said, the president is expected to formally support a controversial gambit that would break the Republican opposition barrier in the Senate.
“I will not surrender. I will not tremble. I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against internal and external enemies,” the 79-year-old Democrat will launch before his audience, according to an excerpt from his previously sent speech.
Joe Biden, after a lively plea for democracy last week on Capitol Hill, chose to speak in Georgia, a former slave state, which was a symbol of yesterday’s civil rights struggle and current political controversies.
Martin Luther King
The Democrat, who before his election had benefited from the crucial support of the personalities of the African American community, promised them to continue and complete the battles of Martin Luther King.
He and Vice President Kamala Harris will lay a wreath in Atlanta at the grave of the anti-apartheid icon who was assassinated in 1968 and his wife Coretta Scott King. Then Joe Biden will visit the Baptist Church where he heads the icon of nonviolent mobilization.
The Democratic president, who had to bury his progressive social agenda for now, cannot afford another setback with the federal “voting rights” bill.
It is a matter of harmonizing the terms under which Americans vote, from registration in electoral records to vote counting, including mail voting or identity checks.
These are all standards that many Republican-controlled southern states, including Georgia, have pledged to modify with the goal of making it more practical for African Americans to reach the polls. With the strengthening of the grip of local authorities, in general, on voting operations.
In response, Joe Biden wants Parliament to pass two laws, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom of Voting Act.
To do so, he “supports Senate rule change,” a senior White House official said, language that hides a major political stake.
Joe Biden, a senator for more than thirty years, has hitherto been reluctant to break a habit so deeply entrenched as difficult to understand outside the United States: the “stall rule.” She wants the Senate to gather a bolstered majority (60 votes) to put most of the texts to a vote.
But the president now supports Democrats (51 Senate votes considering the vice president, 50 Republicans) to pass it into effect and vote by a simple majority.
Abandoning this 60-vote minimum would make the conservative opposition scream, but also crowd out some Democrats associated with this supposed use of consensus-promoting and moderation.
Joe Mansion
But Joe Biden, whose popularity suffers from anemia, believes it is no longer time for moderation. Within a few months, he risks losing his parliamentary majority in the midterm elections, to the charismatic white Republicans over whom Donald Trump maintains enormous dominance.
To pass the resolution into effect, the president must mobilize all Democratic senators without exception, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. The latter, who had been reluctant to follow the path his party staff had taken on “voting rights,” had already himself halted the massive social spending so dear to Joe Biden.
In any case, the role of the president is expected to come from civil rights activists.
What we need is not a visit from the president, the vice president and parliamentarians. We want them to stay in Washington and act immediately,” the “Black Voters Matter” movement said on Twitter.