Will Democrats Change The Senate Rules To Pass Voting Rights Legislation?

The NPR Politics Podcast

NPR

Politics, Daily News, News

4.5 • 24.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2021

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Another high-profile voting rights push has failed because it did not attract enough Republican support to reach the de facto 60-vote threshold needed to pass legislation through the Senate. Will Democrats change the rules to pass their civil rights legislation with a simple majority?

This episode: demographics and culture correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, politics and racial justice correspondent Juana Summers, and White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Laticia. Right now I'm walking my dog Manila, named after one of my favorite contestants
0:05.6	of RuPaul's Drag Race, and the beautiful countryside of Umria in Central Italy, where I've lived for a long time.
0:12.8	This podcast was recorded at 117 pm on Wednesday, October 20th.
0:17.9	Things may have changed, but the time you hear this, they will definitely have changed for me,
0:22.0	because I'm moving to Portugal next month. All right, here's the show. Ciao!
0:29.8	What a life! Our listeners are taunting us at this point with all of these exotic timestamps.
0:35.1	I don't like it. Hey there, it is the NPR Politics podcast. I am Danielle Kurtzleben,
0:40.8	I cover demographics and culture. I'm Wana Summers, I cover politics and racial justice.
0:45.7	And I'm Aesir Asco, I cover the White House. And today we are talking about voting rights.
0:51.2	The Senate is about to vote on a voting rights bill, but Democrats don't have enough support from
0:56.5	the 10 Republicans they would need to pass it. In fact, by the time you hear this, spoiler alert,
1:02.4	the vote will have failed. So let's start with what's in the bill and what it would do. Yeah,
1:07.6	Danielle, so the bill is called the Freedom to Vote Act, and it was negotiated by a big group of
1:12.4	Senate Democrats. And it's actually a scaled down version of a bigger voting rights bill that
1:18.3	folks may be familiar with that was actually filibustered by Republicans earlier this year.
1:23.2	The bill that lawmakers are voting on today does a lot of things. Among them, it would establish
1:28.5	Election Day as a national holiday. It would set some national minimum standards for early voting
1:33.9	and vote by mail. And it would create new requirements for some groups that are not currently required
1:38.9	to disclose their financial donors. It also includes something that was a big priority of West
1:43.7	Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, which is including standards for states that require voter identification.
1:50.5	Now, the one big thing that we should be clear about here is that Democrats are so intent on pushing
1:56.1	federal voting legislation in an attempt to counteract a wave of new restrictions from Republican
	...

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