The battle to protect voting rights needs a field general. Vice President Kamala Harris needs a cause to define her tenure. The second problem suggests the answer to the first: President Joe Biden could designate Harris as the administration’s point person in combatting the onslaught against voter access now advancing in Republican-controlled states.
Both Biden and Harris are speaking more explicitly now than they have in the past about that threat; each delivered forceful statements last weekend on the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when Alabama state troopers brutally attacked protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma. Even though they welcomed the pointed comments, civil-rights advocates I spoke with almost uniformly agree that most Americans remain unaware of the magnitude of the assault on voting rights, an outgrowth of former President Donald Trump’s discredited claims of massive fraud in the 2020 election. …
Biden carries the White House’s biggest megaphone, and he has long experience with these issues—he often touts the work he did with Senate Republicans to reauthorize the original VRA. But some advocates fear that his focus on promoting bipartisanship and staying above the partisan fray is already discouraging the White House from spotlighting the state-level threat. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
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