US vice-president Kamala Harris has been assigned a high-risk task by his boss, President Joe Biden, to lead the administration’s effort to protect voting rights. She has also been tasked with addressing the main cause behind immigration from Central America as the United States is witnessing a surge in refugees looking for asylum in the country. While both tasks are fraught with the high risk of failure, success could be highly rewarding for Harris, who is being dubbed as presidential-nominee-in-waiting.
After Biden asked Harris to lead the administration’s effort to protect the voting rights for all Americans, the vice-president said in a statement that she will work with voting rights organisations, community organisations, and the private sector to help strengthen and uplift efforts. Harris further stated that she will also work with members of Congress to help advance the bills. “Every American has a right to have their voice heard at the ballot box, and no American should be kept from voting early, voting by mail, or voting at all,” she said.
Although the Democrats control the Senate with 50 seats and a tie-breaker vote of Harris, most legislation requires 60 votes to end the debate and go for a full vote on the Senate floor. This procedure allows senators to filibuster and debate the bill endlessly to stall the vote. In order to eliminate the filibuster, all 50 Democratic senators have to be on board with the plan.
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Biden had called for the Senate to pass For the People Act but the legislation is facing opposition from moderate Democrats. Senator Joe Manchin on Sunday said that he will neither vote for the legislation, nor he will support ending the filibuster rule. In an op-ed for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, the Democrat wrote, “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”
“Furthermore, I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster,” he added.
Without Manchin’s support, the voting rights legislation will most likely fail in the evenly-divided Senate. Harris’s new portfolio has now put her squarely in the middle of a partisan battle. Taking a jibe at the challenging assignment, Alyssa Farah, former spokesperson for Mike Pence, said that Biden was carrying on the “long-standing American tradition of passing off the terrible/impossible tasks to your VP.” However, Farah didn’t elaborate on the “impossible” task assigned to Pence under the Trump administration.
Harris is set to depart Washington later on Sunday on her first foreign trip as vice-president. She will visit Guatemala and Mexico to deepen diplomatic ties and lead the administration’s efforts to stem the spike in migration at the US border.
