In fairness, the voting bills put forward by Democrats were always going to be a long-shot: Republicans stood in lockstep opposition to expanding the right to vote, and all 50 Senate Democrats needed to agree to not only support the bills but to weaken the filibuster in order to proceed to a vote. Harris’ appearance was emblematic of a White House that, as critics see it, was disengaged for far too long in the fight to pass voting-rights legislation. The source added, “It wasn’t necessarily the quantity of the time it was the quality of the messages to the groups that are killing themselves to pass these bills.” “It was a chance to fire up the groups that are fighting for this and show a real commitment,” says one participant on the call who asked for anonymity to avoid further fraying relationships with the White House.
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Even if she chose not to share the White House’s own thinking for how to pass new voting-rights legislation, she could’ve used the time to galvanize organizations that had been working non-stop to pass the bills. Several participants on the call say they were surprised by how brief and uninspiring Harris’ appearance was.
Six minutes and 51 seconds later - an irritated participant timed it - Harris thanked the group and logged off. Harris, who was leading the White House’s voting-rights push, summed up her efforts so far by saying that she said she’d held “many, many meetings on voting rights.” Harris’s speech included no specifics she rattled off statistics well-known to everyone on the call about the wave of state-level Republican voting bills and at one point, she mentioned “inside-outside” organizing as if it were a novel concept in a meeting of organizations that spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars on organizing strategy. 'Silence of the Lambs': 'It Broke All the Rules'īut if the allies on that November call had expected a rousing speech or valuable insight into the White House’s strategy on voting rights, they left the call disappointed. Democrats in Congress and liberal outside groups, meanwhile, had pinned their hopes on passing two sweeping pieces of legislation, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, to counter the GOP assault on voting rights. State legislatures led by Republicans had passed dozens of new bills that would make it harder to vote and empower partisan operatives to exert more control over ballot counting and election administration. The voting-reform campaign had reached a critical moment. The participants on the call included the heads of major labor unions, civil-rights leaders, and other influential activists who had supported the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020 and would no doubt be called upon to help reelect that ticket in 2024. WASHINGTON - In mid-November, Vice President Kamala Harris joined a video call with a coalition of nearly 250 groups trying to pass new legislation to protect the right to vote and prevent future election sabotage attempts like what happened after the 2020 election.