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Senate Democrats, meanwhile, miscalculated that if they could flip Manchin, another swing vote, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, would follow his lead. The blame for this defeat, sources say, lies with multiple parties: Manchin either strung along his party for months with no intention of actually supporting the reforms or gave indications to his colleagues that he was on board only to reverse his position on multiple occasions. Rolling Stone interviewed more than 30 key figures inside and outside of Congress to understand how the most ambitious voting-rights bill in generations and the Democratic Party’s main policy response to the Jan. In private, lawmakers and activists predicted victory, arguing that the importance of the issue would overcome the challenge of unifying a 50-member caucus.Īctivists lobby for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. “Failure is not an option,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
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In public, Democratic leaders spoke in existential terms about the need for reform. In response to this onslaught, Democrats in Congress introduced multiple pieces of legislation and vowed to pass the bills in time for the 2022 midterms.
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At the same time, a belief that the last election was somehow stolen or fraudulent - the so-called Big Lie - has become an article of faith for many Republicans. Last year, GOP-run legislatures passed 34 laws in at least 19 states that limit access to voting, put partisan operatives in charge of running elections, and make it harder to participate in American democracy. The Republican Party responded to Joe Biden’s victory with a backlash on the right to vote.
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“Yeah,” Manchin replied, according to Tester.Ī “yes” vote from Manchin could not have been more critical for free and fair elections.
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At the end of one of their calls, Tester recalls saying that with everyone in agreement on a filibuster deal, all they had to do was put the finishing touches on the voting legislation itself and they were ready to proceed. He wanted, as he put it, “some good rule changes to make the place work better.”īy early January, Manchin had given the impression - at least according to his colleagues - that he was ready to amend the filibuster in a way that would open a path to passing voting rights. Yet during months of conversations with Kaine, King, and Tester, Manchin had increasingly lamented the dysfunction in the Senate. Manchin had remained steadfast in his opposition to this plan, arguing that the filibuster protected small states like his and forced lawmakers to seek bipartisan compromise. Not a single Republican had said they would support the voting bill, which left Democrats with only one path to passage: Change the filibuster, the procedural tactic that requires a 60-vote majority to advance most types of legislation. They needed him, with Senate Democrats holding onto the barest majority possible - 50 votes, with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as tiebreaker. On weekends and holidays, on conference calls and huddled in one another’s hideaways in the bowels of the Capitol, Kaine, King, and Tester had urged Manchin to support his party’s proposal for overhauling the country’s voting laws. For the previous six months, Tester and two of his colleagues, Tim Kaine of Virginia and Angus King of Maine, had lobbied Manchin on voting rights and the fate of the filibuster.