The Democrats’ Dead End on Voting Rights

emocrats have cast in dire terms their push to protect and expand voting rights before the next national elections. “Failure is not an option,” Senate Majority Chuck Schumer has repeatedly declared, making the oft-broken vow that leaders in both parties assign to their tippy-top priorities. This afternoon, Schumer brought up his party’s broad election-reform bill for an initial procedural vote, and it failed.

That the legislation, known as the For the People Act, would fall to a GOP filibuster has been clear for months. Democrats, of course, have vowed to press forward and try again. Yet they approached today’s doomed vote without any apparent fallback.

“There better be a Plan B. I just don’t know what it is,” Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii told me last week in the Capitol. When I asked the Senate’s second-most-powerful Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, what the party’s next step would be, he was similarly stumped. “That’s a good question,” Durbin replied. “I don’t know,” conceded both Representative Jerry Nadler of New York, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and, separately, Chris Coons of Delaware, President Joe Biden’s closest Senate ally. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, after first suggesting that Democrats might narrow the bill if it couldn’t pass in its current form, soon acknowledged the obvious. “There’s a top-secret plan in place that I can’t share with you that will eventually get [the bill] passed in totality,” he said with a chuckle.

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