Joe Biden backs Senate rule change to pass voting rights bill

US President Joe Biden, speaking in Atlanta about voting rights and election reform, took aim at “Republican legislators in several states” who “have already announced plans to escalate the onslaught” on voting this year by introducing new legislation restricting voting in their jurisdictions.

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“Their end game, to turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion. Something states can respect or ignore. Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s no longer about who gets to vote. It’s about making it harder to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all. It’s not hyperbole. This is a fact,” Biden said.

Former President Donald Trump and his allies, he claims, want to “disenfranchise anyone who votes against them.”

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Biden referred to the January insurgency at the US Capitol as a “before and after” moment, saying that now is the time for Americans to “confront hard truths” and figure out how to move forward in order to preserve American democracy.

“In our lives — in the life of our nation — there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before and everything that followed,” Biden said. “They rip away the trivial from the essential, and they force us to confront hard truths about ourselves, about our institutions and about our democracy.”

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“Today we come to Atlanta, the cradle of civil rights, to make clear what must come after that dreadful day, when a dagger was literally held at the throat of American democracy,” he added.