Senate Republicans yesterday blocked voting rights and government ethics bill legislation (The People’s Act).The Act was a test vote for Democrats in their fight to pass federal voting reform legislation.
President Biden and Democrats said that the defeat was just the initial drive to bring federal voting rights legislation into law. Now the Senate is looking forward to pass John Lewis Voting Rights Act.
As CNN Politics reported, Vice President Kamala Harris has told reporters that she and President Biden intend to continue to push for voting reform, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which is likely to come to the Senate floor later this year.
The For the People Act aimed to set up automatic voter registration, expand early voting, ensure more transparency in political donations and limit partisan drawing of congressional districts, among other provisions.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act aims to restore enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act.
It was after the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelbey County v Holder that the states began erecting new barriers to voting, ranging from voter ID laws to signature-matching requirements. There was an increase in such activities this year and many Republican-controlled states proposed a raft of new voting restrictions, spurred on by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
A recent version of the new John Lewis Act would extend pre-clearance to states that have incurred multiple voting rights violations in the last 25 years, which is an attempt to get around the Supreme Court majority’s concern in Shelby that states were being punished for decades-old misdeeds, rather than current discriminatory practices.
By team SLC
