(Washington) Travel code has been charged and is politically very dangerous: Joe Biden will promise to do everything he can to reform U.S. electoral law in Georgia on Tuesday, thus protecting minorities and especially African-Americans from entering the referendum.
To do this, a senior White House official said the president is expected to officially support a controversial maneuver to break the barrier of Republican opposition in the Senate.
“I will not give up. I will not tremble. I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against internal and external opponents,” the 79-year-old Democrat will begin to tell his audience, part of his speech was foretold.
Joe Biden has chosen Georgia, the southern state symbol of yesterday’s civil rights struggle and today’s political divisions, to defend the broader reform of the right to vote, following a vibrant appeal for democracy in Capitol Hill last week.
This includes legislating the conditions for exercising the right to vote, from registering in the voter register to the counting of votes, including postal voting or verification of a voter’s identity.
These are, in practice, the criteria that many conservative states have adopted to change, with the effect of complicating access to the ballot box for African Americans and minorities in general.
“Positive”
To counter them, Joe Biden wants Parliament to set up a federal legal framework. Two laws, the “John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act” and the “Freedom of Voting Act”, were to protect the achievements of the struggle against civil rights and racism since the 1960s.
A senior White House official said the U.S. president was “in favor of changing its rules to ensure the Senate is functioning again.”
Behind this intriguing formula is the important political bet that Joe Biden makes.
The former senator was hesitant until this point to break a practice so deeply rooted outside the United States that it is difficult to understand what is known as “Philipster rule” in parliamentary terminology.
The rule is, for simplicity, that the Senate must collect 60 votes to vote on speeches, excluding budget laws.
But Joe Biden is now in favor of the Democrats, who now have 51 seats against the Republicans, who voted with a simple majority, ignoring them.
By breaking this 60-vote rule, the Democratic president will yell at the conservative opposition, but will upset elected officials from his own camp who have joined the practice, which promotes consensus and restraint.
“Rise”
But for Joe Biden, who is mired in Joe Biden’s economic and social agenda and suffers from anemia, Donald Trump, who continues to claim all the evidence that he won the last election, still does not have time to relax in the face of thunderous Donald Trump.
Democrats and supporters of the former president have accused some of the states they control of altering election rules in their favor.
Georgia, for example, has banned postal voting or the distribution of water or food to voters who sometimes wait for hours to cast their ballots. The government has also strengthened its control over the voting process of local elected officials – mostly conservatives.
Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic Senators, said: “This is a low-noise insurgency, but very, very harmful.
Even with the support of a passage in practice in the Senate, Joe Biden has yet to win the game.
He should mobilize all Democratic senators without exception, but Joe Manzin, who has already blocked a major program of the president’s progressive social reforms, is reluctant to follow him on the “right to vote.”
Joe Biden does not have much time to convince him: Democrats will lose their slim parliamentary majority in the midterm elections, in the fall.
