Limited in their options and in disagreement about how far to go to pass federal legislation, Democrats are approaching voting rights as an issue to be won in future elections.
The For the People Act, the Democratic voting rights bill that President Biden urged Congress to pass in a major speech in Philadelphia this afternoon, was first introduced in January 2019. It was a simpler time: Few people outside Georgia had heard of Brad Raffensperger, Jan.6 was just another date on the calendar, and the notion that large numbers of Republicans would join Donald J. Trump in baselessly denying his election loss seemed unlikely. “Some things in America should be simple and straightforward,” Mr. Biden said in the speech, calling the bill “a national imperative.” He added, “Perhaps the most important of those things, the most fundamental of those things, is the right to vote: the right to vote freely, the right to vote fairly and the right to have your vote counted.” The bill, also known as H.R.1 or S.1 (the names are symbolic of its priority for Democrats), addresses concerns that were top of mind for Democrats before the 2020 election, such as banning partisan gerrymandering, making voting easier and enforcing greater transparency on many political donations. Mr. Biden also called for passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would reinstate elements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the Supreme Court struck down in 2013. However, even many commentators who have expressed concerns about the integrity of future elections have criticized the push for the For the People Act as fighting the last war. (Most Republicans have dismissed the bill as a partisan wish list.) These critics, who include The Times’s Nate Cohn, argue that the bill does little to defang the graver threat that elections might be overturned by partisan lawmakers, a possibility that state-level Republicans have pushed toward reality in electorally critical states like Georgia and Arizona. “There are really two different issues going on,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, who supports the For the People Act.
