{"id":42596,"date":"2022-01-20T19:30:51","date_gmt":"2022-01-21T02:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/bennet-hickenlooper-disappointed-over-voting-rights-bills-failure\/"},"modified":"2022-01-21T02:30:51","modified_gmt":"2022-01-21T02:30:51","slug":"bennet-hickenlooper-disappointed-over-voting-rights-bills-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/bennet-hickenlooper-disappointed-over-voting-rights-bills-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"Bennet, Hickenlooper disappointed over voting rights bill\u2019s failure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Bennet
Bennet and Hickenlooper<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

U.S. Senate Democrats failed Wednesday to push through voting rights legislation after Senate Republicans blocked the bill, marking the fifth time they\u2019ve stonewalled similar legislation in less than a year.<\/p>\n

The bill would have made Election Day a national holiday and expanded access to mail-in voting and early voting, among other protections.<\/p>\n

Sen. Michael Bennet called the defeat \u201cdeeply disappointing,\u201d noting that the bill\u2019s passage could have put national voting rights on par with Colorado\u2019s comparably strong voter protections.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur democracy is in a very fragile state, and I think the answer to that fragile democracy is \u2026 to make sure that as many people are voting as possible,\u201d Bennet said Thursday during an interview with The Durango Herald<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Sen. John Hickenlooper expressed similar frustrations with the legislation\u2019s failure in a statement on Twitter.<\/p>\n

\u201cRepublicans just blocked voting rights legislation \u2013 again. The right to vote should not be a partisan issue. It\u2019s what safeguards all our other rights,\u201d Hickenlooper wrote. \u201cI\u2019ll be voting to change the filibuster. Our democracy is too important to lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Senate rule allows opponents of a bill to block it using the \u201cfilibuster,\u201d a tactic used to prolong debate on legislation until 60 of the 100 Senate members vote to end debate. When the voting rights bill was introduced for a vote, it failed to meet the required three-fifths threshold.<\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer responded by introducing a filibuster rule change that would effectively allow the bill to face a simple majority vote.<\/p>\n

Senate Democrats, however, failed to fully coalesce around changing filibuster rules. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were the only Democrats to vote down the change, joined by all 50 Republican senators.<\/p>\n

Bennet and Hickenlooper were vocal supporters of changing the filibuster rules to pass the voting rights legislation.<\/p>\n

In a Wednesday Senate floor speech supporting the bill, Bennet said that \u201cSenate rules are not suspended in amber\u201d and are intended to change with the times.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to have a Senate where you\u2019ve got to come out here and debate, where you can\u2019t filibuster in secret in your office, but you have to be out here to persuade the American people of the righteousness of your cause,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere the minority has the right to offer amendments, and where in the end, 51 senators can actually make a decision so that we can move this country forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

President Joe Biden recently revived the push for increased voter protections as he urged the Senate to change its filibuster rules.<\/p>\n

His vigor was quickly dampened after Manchin and Sinema publicly rejected changing the filibuster in the name of bipartisanship just days before the Wednesday vote.<\/p>\n

\u201cAllowing one party to exert complete control in the Senate with only a simple majority will only pour fuel onto the fire of political whiplash and dysfunction that is tearing this nation apart \u2013 especially when one party controls both Congress and the White House,\u201d Manchin said. \u201cAs such, and as I have said many times before, I will not vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laurie Meininger, president of the League of Women Voters of La Plata County, said \u201cthe failure of our elected officials to pass a voter rights act jeopardizes all of our rights to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

The league, more than 100 years old and 143 members strong, is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating voters and promoting civic participation not just in elections but in all democratic institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re in opposition to anything that\u2019s used as a tool to curtail the rights that we all have as citizens and certainly the filibuster of late seems to be used in that way,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Though Bennet expressed regret the legislation didn\u2019t pass, he said the fight for better national voting rights is far from over.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the meantime, we need to make sure that we protect Colorado\u2019s right to vote,\u201d he said. \u201cThe way I think about it is, people in our state really have kind of a bill of rights when it comes to voting, and we\u2019ve got tremendous access, and it\u2019s fraud-free, and we\u2019ve got to protect it now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Skye Witley, a senior at American University in Washington, D.C., is an intern for The Durango Herald and The Journal in Cortez<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Legislation\u2019s progress was stymied by Senate Republicans, two Democrats<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[28,1566,1621],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-42596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-headlines","tag-u-s-senate","tag-voting"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42596"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=42596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}