‘This is a test of our time,’ Biden says in Philly speech on voting rights

PHILADELPHIA – President Joe Biden called the right to vote “a test of our time” and called on Americans to protect it amid GOP-led changes to election laws and threats to voting rights in a speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

“Some things in America should be simple and straightforward – perhaps the most important of those things, the most fundamental of those things, is the right to vote,” Biden said to applause.

“Its up to all of us to protect that right,” he added. “This is a test of our time.”

He later called GOP laws that would give political figures more say over certifying elections “the most dangerous subversion” of elections in U.S. history.

Biden began speaking shortly after 2:45 p.m. to a crowd of several hundred, with spectators peering over the upper balcony and stairs in the Grand Hall of the museum.

He called for efforts to pass Democrats’ sweeping voting rights bill, the For the People Act, and blasted false attacks on the 2020 election, saying not just Americans, but the entire globe is watching for signs of the strength of the world’s leading democracy.

“You don’t call facts fake and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy. That’s not statesmanship, that’s selfishness,” Biden said.

“That’s not democracy, that’s the denial of the right to vote. It suppresses. It subjugates.”

The speech comes as Biden faces increasing pressure but diminishing options on voting rights, one of his and his party’s top priorities. It’s an issue that has roiled politics in Pennsylvania and across the country.

Democrats in recent weeks have seen their voting rights bill stifled in the Senate and another Supreme Court decision further weaken the enforcement powers of the Voting Rights Act, while Republican state legislatures continue advancing laws making voting more difficult.

Biden pointed directly to those laws, calling them a “21st Century Jim Crow assault.”

“They want to make it so hard and inconvenient that they hope people don’t vote at all,” he said.

Biden said he would beef up the Department of Justice’s enforcement of voting rights laws. But at the same time, his call for public action signaled his limited powers to move legislation in Washington, where Democrats’ slim Senate majority, and the Senate filibuster, has left them unable to advance any major voting bill.

Some of the president’s top allies, including U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.), and civil rights leaders have pressed Biden to call for an end or modification to that Senate rule, which requires a supermajority for most legislation and stands in the way of Democrats’ voting rights push.

Biden has said it’s up to the Senate to make those rules and noted that Democrats don’t have enough votes to change it. (Several of their members oppose the idea.) White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that Biden hasn’t supported a change because Democrats have often used the rule themselves to block GOP initiatives.