Late Wednesday night, Democratic Senators suffered a stinging defeat when their months-long effort to pass sweeping voting-rights reform was torpedoed by the entire Republican caucus—with help from two of their own: Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Democrats had hoped to pass two bills: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have restored and reinforced parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have expanded voting access by making Election Day a holiday, required early voting periods of at least 15 days and made it more difficult for states to remove eligible voters from voter rolls, among other measures.
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The floor vote was contentious and emotional. “You’re either a racist or a hypocrite. Really, really? Is that where we are?” Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said of Democrats’ arguments that not supporting these reforms evoked the spirit of late Alabama Governor George Wallace, an infamous segregationist. (Though Manchin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona said they supported the merits of the bills, they both voted against changing Senate rules to allow them to pass by a simple majority.)
But by the next morning, Senators from both parties had already begun ramping up conversations on how they could work together to enact a narrower piece of election reform: fixing a 135-year-old law called the Electoral Count Act (ECA) that Donald Trump allies seized on in their attempts to challenge the election certification processes and storm the U.S. Capitol building last January.
The ECA reform effort is being led by Maine Senators Angus King, an Independent, and Susan Collins, a Republican. King has been working on drafting legislation to improve the ECA for about nine months, according to one of his aides. He began more outreach on the plan after the two larger bills failed, and spoke with South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds about…
Source : time
