Episode Details

President Biden will go to Georgia tomorrow to give a speech on voting rights. It’s expected to be as hard-hitting as his speech last Thursday about Trump and the attack on the Capitol. Biden will push for reform of the senate filibuster to carve out voting rights from its 60-vote requirement, thereby opening the way for senate Democrats to enact the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Amendment Act.

As you probably know, the Freedom to Vote Act would preempt state efforts to suppress votes and take over election machinery. The John Lewis Voting Rights Amendment Act would restore the “pre-clearance” requirement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (before the Supreme Court gutted it in 2013) which forced states with a history of discrimination – including Georgia -- to get Justice Department approval before they changed their voting rules.

But Biden will need more than a hard-hitting speech to reform the filibuster and open the door for these two critical pieces of legislation. And his most important audience isn’t in Georgia, which already has two Democratic senators who will support him. It’s in West Virginia, whose senior Democratic senator is signaling he will not.

Georgia is, however, strategically important to voting rights in other ways. It has several major races this year, including Senator Raphael Warnock’s bid for reelection and Stacy Abrams’ campaign for governor against Republican incumbent Brian Kemp. (The only reason Democrats have a Senate majority right now is because they prevailed in both of Georgia’s runoff elections on January 5 of last year, electing Warnock and Senator Jon Ossoff.)

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Georgia also typifies what’s happening in several other southern states, such as North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona. Atlanta is becoming a major global economic hub, inhabited by upwardly-mobile and well-educated professionals who tend to vote for Democrats. Rural Georgia is a challenged economic backwater inhabited by less-educated voters who have been on a downward slide for years, making them highly susceptible to Trumpian racism and xenophobia, and Fox News’s conspiracy theories.

The shift toward cosmopolitan Atlanta hasn’t yet changed the composition of Georgia’s legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans. Shortly after Biden’s victory, it passed laws requiring additional ID for absentee voting, removing early voting sites, and allowing state takeovers of county elections. Georgia’s GOP lawmakers are now readying bills to nix voting touchscreen machines and expand probes into voter fraud, among other anti-democracy initiatives.

Hence the importance of national voting rights legislation, and of the Democrats’ move to reform the filibuster. Senate Democrats have given up on “Build Back Better” for now and are pivoting to voting rights, and a filibuster carveout for voting rights.

But Manchin, the Holdout-in-Chief, is standing in the way, just as he did on “Build Back Better.” He says the only way he’ll support a carveout from the filibuster for voting rights is if it’s “bipartisan.”

This is a bizarre argument, for several reasons. First, there’s no precedent requiring that changes in the filibuster rule be bipartisan. In recent decades the rule has been changed several times -- most recently by McConnell and the Republicans, to confirm Supreme Court nominees with a bare majority – without bipartisan support.

It’s also bizarre because of America’s history of racism, which has not been fought through bipartisanship. Representative Jim Clyburn from South Carolina, the third-ranking House Democrat, whose endorsement of Biden during the Democratic primaries put Biden over the top, put it bluntly:

“