House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) on Sunday expressed a tiny glimmer of hope for Democrats’ election reform bills that appear to be stalled in the Senate, claiming the legislation “may be on life support” but isn’t necessarily dead yet.
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) announced that the Senate would be voting on voting rights legislation on Tuesday despite the fact that centrist Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Joe Manchin (WV) have already reiterated their support for retaining the chamber’s 60-vote threshold needed for passing bills.
Sinema and Manchin, who have both claimed that they support the current voting rights proposals, also met with President Joe Biden recently as Democrats pull out all the stops in an effort to get something done to counter restrictive voting laws passed by GOP-led state legislations. Though, much like with the similarly doomed Build Back Better Act, the Democrats’ bills appear to be DOA.
ADVERTISEMENT
During an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union, Clyburn acknowledged that while election reform is perilously close to getting snuffed out, Democrats shouldn’t toss in the towel right now.
Bringing up Sinema’s argument that getting rid of the filibuster could backfire on Democrats if Republicans take back the Senate and the White House by 2025, Clyburn said he wasn’t on the same page as the moderate Arizona senator.
“Look, no, she is not right about that,” the influential congressman exclaimed. “We just got around the filibuster to raise the debt limit. Why? Because we don’t want to put the full faith and credit of the United States at risk. No one has asked her to eliminate the filibuster. The filibuster is there for all of these issues that may be policy issues.”
He added: “But when it comes to the Constitution of the United States of America, no one person sitting downtown in a spa ought to be able to pick up the telephone and say you are going to put a hold on my ability to vote. And that’s what is going on here.”
At the same time, Clyburn did say he was “going to stay out” of any potential Democratic primary challenges to Sinema when she comes up for re-election in 2024.
Tapper, meanwhile, ended the interview by pressing the South Carolina congressman on whether or not he believes the election reform bills are “dead” in the Senate.
“No, I don’t,” Clyburn declared. “They may be on life support, but, you know, John Lewis and others did not give up after the ’64 Civil Rights Act. That’s why we got the ’65 Voting Rights Act.”
The Democratic lawmaker concluded: “So, I want to tell everybody, we’re not giving up. We’re going to fight. And we plan to win, because the people of good will are going to break their silence and help us win this battle.”
In a separate interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, Clyburn said the Senate vote on the legislation should “absolutely” move forward because supporters of the bills “need to know who is with us and who is not.”
Acknowledging that the vote—which will almost certainly fail—does raise the “threat” that it will expose Democratic disunity and could be “demoralizing” to Democrats in an election year, he argued that the party should “have this debate” to “see where we stand” moving forward.
