Politics- President
Joe Biden will back changing the filibuster to pass a voting-rights law, per reports. - The rule has been used by Senate Republicans to block voting-rights bills.
President Joe Biden plans to lend his support to changing the Senate filibuster rules in order to pass new voting-rights legislation, several reports said.
Biden is due to outline this stance in a Tuesday speech in Atlanta, Georgia, The New York Times reported. The White House confirmed the plans to Reuters.
The president would not call for totally getting rid of the filibuster, a senior administration official told the Times, but for a temporary suspension in order to push through a voting rights bill.
A White House official told CNN that the rules needed to be changed to pass voting-rights legislation so that "this basic right is defended."
A bill to defend voting rights is one of Biden's key domestic priorities. Democrats say Republican-controlled state legislatures across the US have hampered access to voting by passing new restrictions.
Democrats say the bills specifically target Black voters in states such as Georgia, and Biden has likened them to the racist Jim Crow laws of the segregationist South.
The issue has gained added urgency in recent weeks with the stalling of Biden's other key domestic priority, his Build Back Better social and climate change bill, due to opposition from Democratic moderate Sen. Joe Manchin.
Republicans have blocked two attempts by Democrats to pass bills defending voting rights, most recently in November. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that the bills are an attempt by Democrats to secure an unfair advantage, and said they would violate the right of states to decide how they conduct elections.
Republicans blocked the bills using the filibuster, a blocking measure that can only be overcome with 60 or more votes, numbers the Democrats are not close to securing from their own ranks of 50 senators.
The impasse in December led Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to declare that Democrats would seek to reform the filibuster.
However the move would require the unanimous backing of Democratic senators in order to pass, and Manchin plus fellow moderate Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have said they are opposed.