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Tuesday 1/11/22

Tuesday 1/11/22 1

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PBS NewsHour live episode, Jan. 11, 2022
Politico, January 11, 2022 – 6:00 pm (ET)

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/11/biden-harris-voting-rights-speech-526903

‘I’m tired of being quiet’: Biden and Harris make forceful push for voting rights
Politico, Myah WardJanuary 11, 2022

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday delivered back-to-back speeches in the nation’s epicenter of the civil rights movement, urging Congress to pass voting rights legislation in a moment they deemed a turning point for democracy.

Speaking at the Atlanta University Center Consortium, on the grounds of two historically Black colleges — Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College — Harris called on the Senate to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, aimed at restoring key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the For the People Act, intended to expand ballot access, among other provisions.

“The assault on our freedom to vote will be felt by every American in every community in every political party. And if we stand idly by, our entire nation will pay the price for generations to come,” Harris said, warning that it is uncertain when there will be another opportunity to pass the legislation. “As Dr. King said, the battle is in our hands. And today, the battle is in the hands of the leaders of the American people, those in particular that the American people sent to the United States Senate.”

The vice president, who was tapped to lead the administration’s push on election reform legislation, talked about Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy of fighting for the right to vote, and that of Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights icon who died in 2020.

Biden took the stage second and followed with a pointed message for GOP lawmakers, at the state and federal level. Often using Georgia as an example, he condemned Republican-led laws “designed to suppress your vote, to subvert our elections.”

Biden, Harris deliver remarks in Georgia on protecting voting rights, election integrity
Associated Press, January 11, 2022 – 3:30 pm (ET)

https://apnews.com/article/voting-rights-joe-biden-georgia-voting-martin-luther-king-jr-dc4544c23622f35fc95d63afe512554d

Biden to back filibuster changes to push voting rights bill
Associated Press, Alexandra Jaffe et al.January 11, 2022

President Joe Biden will use a speech in Georgia to endorse changing Senate rules that have stalled voting rights legislation, saying it’s time to choose “democracy over autocracy.” But some civil rights groups won’t be there, in protest of what they say is administration inaction.

As he turns to his current challenge, Biden on Tuesday is also paying tribute to civil rights battles past — visiting Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once held forth from the pulpit, and placing a wreath at the crypt of King and his wife, Coretta Scott King.

With Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., setting next Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a deadline to either pass voting legislation or consider revising the rules around the chamber’s filibuster blocking device, Biden is expected to evoke the memories of the U.S. Capitol riot a year ago in more forcefully aligning himself with the voting rights effort.

Today onAir
CNN, Ronald Brownstein,

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/11/politics/one-party-control-white-house-congress/index.html

If Democrats can’t pass their agenda now, they may not get another chance for years. Here’s why
CNN, Ronald BrownsteinJanuary 11, 2022

The last four times a president went into midterm elections holding unified control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, as Joe Biden and Democrats do now, voters have revoked it.

It happened to Donald Trump in 2018, Barack Obama in 2010, George W. Bush in 2006 and Bill Clinton in 1994: All lost control of at least one congressional chamber, crippling their ability to advance their legislative agendas. In fact, no president who went into midterms with unified control of government has successfully defended it since Jimmy Carter in 1978, when Democrats were still cushioned by the enormous margins they amassed in the backlash against Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.

That’s the foreboding history heightening Democratic anxiety about their struggle to move the key pillars of their economic and voting rights agenda past the resistance of Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

Over the past roughly 50 years it has grown much more difficult that it was earlier in the 20th century for either party to achieve, and especially to sustain, simultaneous control of the White House and both congressional chambers. Moreover, since the 1970s, neither party has regained unified control of government faster than 10 years after losing it.

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