[The lack of progress has frustrated civil rights leaders and
activists who charge that the president isn’t taking the fight for
voting rights seriously enough.] [[link removed]]

BIDEN VOWED TO MAKE RACIAL JUSTICE THE HEART OF HIS AGENDA – IS IT
STILL BEATING?  
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Lauren Gambino
September 8, 2021
The Guardian
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_ The lack of progress has frustrated civil rights leaders and
activists who charge that the president isn’t taking the fight for
voting rights seriously enough. _

The Rev Al Sharpton speaks at the flagship event of a nationwide
march for voting rights on the 58th anniversary of the March on
Washington. , Photograph: Allison Bailey/Rex/Shutterstock

 

Defying the punishing August heat, the Rev Al Sharpton recently led a
gathering thousands strong through the streets of the nation’s
capital on the 58th anniversary of the March on Washington, when
Martin Luther King Jr delivered his immortal I Have a Dream speech on
that day in 1963.

Now, as then, there was an urgency to their march. In statehouses
across the country, Republicans are proposing – and passing – new
voter restrictions that activists say amount to the greatest erosion
of voting rights since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, a
crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.

Speaking near the White House, Sharpton recalled Joe
Biden’s victory-night promise
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lead the “great battle” for racial justice. The time to fight had
come, the reverend told Biden.

“You said the night you won that Black America had your back, and
that you were going to have Black Americans’ backs,” Sharpton
said. “Well, Mr President, they’re stabbing us in the back.”

Since taking office, Biden has placed racial justice at the center of
his governing agenda, embedding language that promotes equity into his
executive orders, policy proposals and public speeches. “The dream
of justice for all will be deferred no longer,” he vowed in his
inauguration address. “We can deliver racial justice.”

Yet the escalating fight over voting rights underscores the difficulty
Biden faces in his efforts to advance racial equity. It is an issue
that is critical to his legacy but one that faces a myriad of
political and legal obstacles. From voting rights to policing reform
to helping Black farmers and other critical issues, Biden’s racial
justice agenda has suffered a wide array of setbacks and delays during
his first year in office.

Despite controlling the White House and Congress, Democrats have yet
to pass a pair of federal elections bills that are the centerpiece of
the party’s strategy for beating back the sweep of new voting
restrictions in Republican-led states.

The bills include the For the People Act, a far-reaching overhaul of
federal election laws that would expand early voting, automatic and
same-day registration, and prevent the severe manipulation of district
boundaries for partisan gain; and the John Lewis Voting Rights
Advancement Act, which would restore critical pieces of the 1965
Voting Rights Act after supreme court rulings gutted the law.

“To address 400 years of racial oppression in this country, you must
first protect the rights of all citizens, and particularly African
Americans, to fully participate in our democracy,” said Derrick
Johnson, the president of the NAACP.

“All public policy germinates from that overarching right to
vote,” he added. “If you suppress the right to vote, you cannot
advance public policy to address the systemic barriers.”

In a speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race
massacre, Biden called voting rights “fundamental” to ensuring
racial equity and charged his vice-president, Kamala Harris, with
leading the effort to pass legislation on Capitol Hill. In a second
speech earlier this summer, he decried Republican efforts to restrict
voting as the “most significant test of our democracy since the
civil war” and implored lawmakers to act.

But the bills remain stalled in the evenly divided Senate, where the
filibuster requires 60 votes to advance legislation. The lack of
progress has frustrated civil rights leaders and activists who charge
that the president isn’t taking the fight for voting rights
seriously enough
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“What we have seen to date in terms of action does not match the
passion of the president or the vice-president’s rhetoric,” said
Nsé Ufot, the executive director of the New Georgia Project. “It
doesn’t match the intensity of their speeches and it certainly
doesn’t match the urgency of this moment.”

Ufot is among a coalition of civil rights advocates pressuring Biden
to invest the same political capital and urgency into voting rights as
he has other issues like infrastructure and the withdrawal of troops
from Afghanistan.

They say the president and Democrats are wasting precious time trying
to persuade Republicans to support the bills. Instead, they are
calling on the party to eliminate the filibuster altogether or to
carve out an exception to the filibuster allowing voting rights
legislation to pass on a party-line vote without Republican support.

“The question is, when are we going to talk about the filibuster and
getting rid of it?” Ufot said. “Because that appears to be the
only path forward to getting this passed.”

Biden and the White House have countered the criticism, citing the
lack of support among Senate Democrats to further chip away at the
filibuster. At least two senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and
Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, are reluctant to restrict the use of the
filibuster – the very tool Republicans used to block consideration
of the For the People Act earlier this summer.

Democrats’ narrow majorities have made progress on other aspects of
his racial agenda equally difficult.

Biden’s deadline for passing a federal police reform bill by the
first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd went unmet as
lawmakers repeatedly failed to reach a consensus. Negotiations are
ongoing but its prospects remain dim
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Measures included in his infrastructure proposal to address historic
inequities were cut as part of a bipartisan deal backed by the
president – among them, a $20bn initiative to rectify the damage
caused decades ago by highway construction in Black and Latino
communities was reduced
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just $1bn. The plan also scrapped a $400bn proposal to improve
long-term care for older and disabled Americans. The program would
have helped
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wages for care workers, who are predominantly women of color.

Conservative lawyers are also closely monitoring the Biden
administration’s actions. Legal challenges have stymied some of the
administration’s attempts to promote racial equity.

This summer, a federal judge halted a federal program that would
forgive the debts of Black farmers after generations of race-based
discrimination. The hold was in response to lawsuits filed by white
farmers who said the program was unfair and discriminatory. In another
legal challenge, white business owners successfully challenged an
administration policy to prioritize applicants for pandemic relief
grants from women and people of color. As a result,
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approvals for nearly 3,000 priority applicants were rescinded.

Last month, the supreme court rejected the Biden administration’s
latest attempt to extend a federal moratorium on evictions, which
have disproportionately
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Black and Latino families during the pandemic.

Yet the obstacles have not stopped the administration from making
progress on other fronts.

Many civil rights leaders were encouraged
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Biden’s opening act as president. He appointed one of the most
diverse cabinets in history, which includes the first Black and Asian
American female vice-president; and he signed a flurry of executive
orders 
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aim to make racial equality “the responsibility of the whole of our
government”. Among them were actions to address housing
discrimination, phase out the Department of Justice’s use of private
prisons, rescind a Trump-era commission that sought to minimize the
role of slavery in the nation’s founding, ensure that vaccines were
distributed equitably and expand voting rights
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In June, Biden signed into law a bill that established Juneteenth as a
federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

And the $1.9tn coronavirus relief plan that Biden pushed through in
March released billions of dollars in aid to poor families, spurring a
dramatic reduction in poverty, especially for Black and Latino
families.

And in July, the justice department, under the leadership of the
attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced that it was suing Georgia
over a sweeping voting law on the grounds that the measure
discriminated against Black voters.

Voting rights, advocates say, pose the most significant test of
whether Biden can deliver on his promise to combat systemic racism in
America. The consequences of failure are hardly hypothetical, they
say.

At least 18 states enacted 30 laws making it harder for Americans to
vote as of mid-July, according to an analysis
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the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. On Tuesday, Governor Greg
Abbott of Texas signed into law a sweeping new measure overhauling the
state’s elections that critics say will make it one of the hardest
places in America to vote, particularly for people of color.

“Central to the work of racial justice is ensuring that Black and
brown, our most marginalized communities, our most marginalized
residents of this country, have access to the ballot,” said Taifa
Smith Butler, president of Demos, a Washington thinktank that promotes
racial equity. “We need bold, courageous leadership from the
administration in the protection of this democracy, because the fears
that we have today can only be quelled by the passage of these two
voting rights bills.”

_Lauren Gambino is political correspondent for Guardian US, based in
Washington DC. Twitter @laurenegambino
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