Pressure is intensifying on President Joe Biden to articulate a plan to enact meaningful voter protections as a counter to strict new voting laws going into place around the nation after warning for the past year of nascent dangers to democracy.

Biden heads to Atlanta on Tuesday to make an urgent new case for voting rights legislation as Democrats prepare to advance two new bills that will require a weakening of Senate filibuster rules in order to pass — a step Biden is prepared to endorse.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris — who asked Biden last year to take on voting rights as her signature issue — plan to lay a wreath at Martin Luther King Jr.’s crypt and visit the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the slain civil rights leader preached.

Coming at a critical moment, the day is meant, in part, to quiet criticism that the President hasn’t done enough to break a congressional logjam. That criticism is growing louder after a coalition of voting rights groups annoced Monday they would be boycotting the President’s speech.

The United States and Russia managed a first day of security talks Monday without a breakdown that might give Moscow any basis to carry out a threatened military strike on Ukraine.

But even as Russia’s lead negotiator, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, insisted the Kremlin had no plan for another invasion of its western neighbor, it was clear that Moscow and Washington are confronting virtually unbridgeable differences on many issues — including a repeated demand by the Kremlin for hard guarantees that Ukraine and Georgia will never join NATO.

The wide gulf between the former Cold War rivals became clear as Ryabkov and his U.S. counterpart, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, held dueling news conferences at the end of the daylong negotiations, which were conducted at the U.S. Mission in Geneva.

Discussions over the threat of a Russian military incursion and demands for an array of security concessions by the West will continue on Wednesday in Brussels at NATO headquarters, and on Thursday in Vienna at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The highlight from the first round of deliberations Monday, however, was Ryabkov’s insistence that Russia was not preparing any imminent move against Ukraine, which it invaded in 2014 before annexing Crimea, and where it has backed an armed separatist uprising in the eastern region of Donbas that continues today.

Senate Democrats are growing less and less confident about whether Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) wants to strike a legislative deal with President Biden.

The lack of negotiations with Manchin since Congress returned from the Christmas recess and Manchin’s definitive statements of opposition are raising serious doubts about whether he would be willing to support any version of the Build Back Better Act, which would provide new funding for healthcare, child care and host of other initiatives.

Manchin says he has tried to be as clear as possible about where he is, but fellow Senate Democratic colleagues feel confused about whether the West Virginia senator can be counted on to support some version of Biden’s sweeping agenda.

The public focus of Congress’ Jan. 6 investigation, so far, is what happened in Washington, D.C. Behind the scenes, the probe’s state-level work is kicking into overdrive.

The House committee investigating the Capitol attack has gathered thousands of records from state officials and interviewed a slate of witnesses as it attempts to retrace former President Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election, particularly in four key states that swung the presidency to Joe Biden. They’re getting ready to take their work public, possibly as soon as the spring.

“We want to let the public see and hear from those individuals who conducted elections in those states,” select panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in an interview. He described those witnesses as particularly important given their mandates to keep elections “fair and impartial” while hailing from one political party.

Democrats are mounting an impassioned bid to overhaul Senate rules that stand in the way of their sweeping voting legislation, arguing dark forces unleashed by Donald Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election demand an extraordinary response.

In fiery speeches and interviews, President Joe Biden and top congressional Democrats have seized on the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection as a reason to advance their long-stalled voting, ethics and elections package. Senate Republicans, who have repeatedly blocked the legislation, excoriate the measures as a “partisan power grab” and warn that any rule changes will haunt Democrats someday under a GOP majority.

Trump’s false claims of a stolen election not only incited the mob that stormed the Capitol, Democrats say. His unrelenting campaign of disinformation also sparked a GOP effort to pass new state laws that have made it more difficult to vote, while in some cases rendering the administration of elections more susceptible to political influence.

Former first lady Michelle Obama has a message for Americans ahead of the 2022 midterm elections: “We’ve got to vote like the future of our democracy depends on it.”

In a letter titled “Fight For Our Vote,” which was published Sunday as an ad in the New York Times, Obama and her voting rights organization When We All Vote called on Americans to continue engaging in democracy amid a historic attack on voting rights.

The letter — which comes as Congress has yet to move on voting rights legislation at the federal level — was signed by 30 other civic engagement, voting rights and voter mobilization organizations including the NAACP, Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action, Voto Latino Foundation, NextGen America, LeBron James’ More Than A Vote and Rock the Vote.

“We stand united in our conviction to organize and turn out voters in the 2022 midterm elections, and make our democracy work for all of us,” Obama wrote in the letter.

The former first lady laid out a plan of action and said within the next year, When We All Vote and the coalition of other organizations will work to “recruit and train at least 100,000 volunteers” and “register more than a million new voters.”