*President Joe Biden abandoned his inclinations toward bipartisanship today, blasting Republicans in an Atlanta speech for a raft of new GOP led state voting laws. For the first time, he backed the idea of allowing voting rights legislation to pass with a simple Senate majority rather than a filibuster-proof 60 bipartisan votes.
“This is the moment to defend our democracy,” Biden said today.
Yet even some liberal-leaning election law experts say Biden’s focus on voting rights obscures a larger threat to U.S. election integrity in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential contest: The idea that a future election loser could subvert the country’s electoral machinery to take power — in other words, the next insurrection might be successful.
“It’s the primary thing,” Richard Pildes, an election law expert at New York University, told PoliticoNightly.
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Pildes and Ned Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, joined two conservative scholars in an op-ed to argue for the urgency of reforming the Electoral Count Act, a 150-year-old law that contains the rules for how Congress certifies a presidential election. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has expressed interest in reforming the law. Biden didn’t mention the Electoral Count Act in his speech today.
Biden picked the wrong moment to discard bipartisanship, Foley told Nightly today.
“It was essential, in my judgment, to make common cause with every possible Republican,” Foley said. In his view, the country’s democracy is in crisis, one that requires Democrats to reach out to Republicans willing to buck former President Donald Trump — not give them a reason to unite against Democrats.
