The United States Senate began Tuesday to debate a critical bill to protect the right to vote against restrictions imposed in some states by Republicans.
The initiative is a key piece of the agenda of the US president, Joe Biden, but it has no signs of prospering due to the block opposition of the Republicans and two senators from his own party, the Democrats.
At the beginning of the debate, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, acknowledged that the project has little chance of going ahead, but did not give up the battle.
"The eyes of the nation are on what happens here this week.", declared Schumer from the hemicycle.
Schumer’s strategy is to force senators to vote on the legislation to get them to take a formal stand. In this way, he hopes that two Democratic senators, Kyrsten Sinema, from Arizona, and Joe Manchin, from West Virginia, will give in and support his proposal to modify the Senate rules and approve the voting law.
The legislative project that Schumer wants to approve combines two initiatives: the so-called "Voting freedom law" ("Freedom to Vote Act") and the "John Lewis Voting Rights Promotion Act", in honor of the late Georgia legislator and leader of the African-American civil rights movement in the 1960s.
The current text, already approved in the Lower House, would guarantee the right to early voting and voting by mail, in addition to establishing that election day is a national holiday, which could increase participation since the US. always holds elections on a working Tuesday in November.
It would also allow the Justice Department to monitor any changes to election laws in states that have a history of discriminating against racial minorities.
However, the legislative draft has little expectation of prospering in the Upper House due to the narrow majority that the Democrats have here and due to a maneuver called filibustering that the Republicans are using and that allows the debate of any measure to be prevented if a minimum of 60 votes.
Faced with this situation, Biden has changed the position he had until now and has been in favor of modifying the rules of that chamber to get rid of filibustering.
To do so, however, the Democrats need the support of Sinema and Manchin, who do not want to change the Senate’s rules but do support the bill to protect voting rights.
This is the fifth time that the Senate will try to pass a law to protect the right to vote during this legislative period, which began with the arrival of Biden to the White House a year ago.
The battle over voting rights is taking place because there is no central electoral system in the United States and each state sets its own electoral rules.
During the pandemic, many territories relaxed the requirements to vote by mail or in advance, which caused a record participation in the 2020 elections and fueled conspiracy theories by the then president, Donald Trump (2017-2021), and his followers about an alleged massive fraud at the polls, dismissed by the courts for lack of evidence.
In reaction, Republicans have passed 33 laws in 19 states over the past year that limit voting.
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