华盛顿——参议院民主党人正试图迫使公众摊牌选举旨在就一个关键问题展开辩论聚会尽管不能保证该法案将会被投票表决。

多数党领袖查克·舒默(Chuck Schumer)在美联社周三获得的一份备忘录中概述了这一计划，该备忘录是在美国总统乔·拜登(Joe Biden)访华前夕获得的，目的是与参议院民主党人私下会面，讨论前进的道路。这仍然让民主党人需要一种方式来强制对该法案进行投票，该法案现在被共和党的阻挠议案所阻止。

舒默在给民主党同事的备忘录中写道:“我们最终将有机会就投票权立法进行辩论——这是共和党迄今为止一直否认的事情。”这份备忘录描述了一种变通方法，以避免共和党的阻挠议事行为，这种行为几个月来一直阻碍着参议院对该立法的正式辩论。“参议员们终于可以向美国人民表明，他们在保护我们的民主和维护每个合格美国人投票的权利方面的立场。”

这一策略无助于解决民主党面临的核心问题——他们缺乏共和党的支持来通过该法案选举但也没有得到所有50名民主党人的支持，他们要求修改参议院规则，允许他们自己通过。但最新的策略可能会与他们最初的做法形成反差，最初的做法是迫使参议院在周一之前就阻挠议案的修改进行投票，以此向西弗吉尼亚州的民主党参议员乔·曼钦(Joe Manchin)和亚利桑那州的基斯顿·西内马(Kyrsten Sinema)施压。

通过发起一场辩论，舒默将实现民主党人的目标，即点亮聚光灯，激励参议员说出他们的立场。众议院的辩论可能会持续数天，并带有一代人前民权斗争的回声，那场斗争导致了参议院历史上一些最著名的阻挠议事者。

舒默周三对记者表示:“我不想欺骗任何人，让他们认为这很容易。他称这次推进是一场“艰苦的战斗”。

民主党人誓言要抵制一波新的州法律，这些法律受到唐纳德·特朗普虚假声称选举被盗的启发，使投票变得更加困难。但在最初的一系列活动后，民主党人的努力在分裂的参议院停滞不前，他们缺乏60票来克服共和党的阻挠，导致他们呼吁改变规则。

最近他们试图给这项努力注入新的活力。拜登周二在亚特兰大发表了一场激烈的演讲，他告诉参议员们，如果他们不采取行动，他们每个人都将受到“历史的评判”。他将于周四在国会大厦会见民主党参议员，试图推动这一努力。

参议院共和党领袖米奇·麦康奈尔(Mitch McConnell)周三对拜登的讲话进行了严厉反驳，反对他将投票立法的反对者与种族主义历史人物进行比较，包括竞选总统的种族隔离主义阿拉巴马州州长乔治·华莱士和邦联总统杰斐逊·戴维斯。

“你不能发明比我们刚刚看到的更好的立法阻挠的广告:一个总统放弃理性的劝说，纯粹的煽动，”麦康奈尔，R-Ky。，在参议院说。“一位总统大喊52名参议员和数百万美国人是种族主义者，除非他得到他想要的任何东西，这恰恰证明了为什么制宪者建立参议院是为了制衡他的权力。”

周三，当被问及对麦康奈尔言论的回应时，拜登转过身，摘下黑色口罩，说道:“我喜欢米奇·麦康奈尔。他是我的朋友。”这一回应是在拜登前往国会大厦悼念前参议院多数党领袖哈里·里德期间做出的，哈里·里德于上月去世，目前躺在圆形大厅里。

共和党人几乎一致反对投票立法，认为这是联邦的过度行为，会损害各州自己进行选举的能力。他们还指出，民主党人反对改变特朗普当总统时寻求的阻挠议事方式。

对民主党人和拜登来说，这项立法是政治上的当务之急。如果不能通过，将违背对黑人选民的一项重大竞选承诺，因为黑人选民帮助民主党控制了白宫和国会，并且将在中期选举前到来，届时微弱的民主党多数将岌岌可危。这也将是拜登议程在一个月内的第二次重大挫折，此前曼钦在圣诞节前不久停止了总统2万亿美元社会和环境倡议的工作。

目前的投票和道德立法一揽子计划将迎来美国选举一代人以来最大的改革，以选举安全的名义扫除投票障碍，降低大笔资金在政治中的影响力，并限制党派对国会选区划分的影响。该方案将创建超越州级共和党法律的全国选举标准。它还将恢复司法部在有歧视历史的州监督选举法的能力。

许多民权活动人士认为，拜登在投票权上的推动对于积极追求共和党支持的州投票法改革来说，为时过早，为时过早。他们认为，这是一种更微妙的投票限制形式，比如识字测试和人头税，曾经被用来剥夺黑人选民的选举权。一些人抵制拜登周二在亚特兰大的演讲。

由佐治亚州民主党州长候选人斯泰西·艾布拉姆斯创立的“新佐治亚计划”是呼吁拜登跳过演讲的组织之一。

该组织在一份声明中表示:“我们以前听到过类似的言论。“没有计划的目标只是一个愿望。”

舒默将马丁·路德·金的假期定在1月17日，作为通过投票立法或考虑修订阻挠议事规则的最后期限。目前还不清楚计划中的规则修改投票是否还会发生。

曼钦在起草民主党投票立法方面发挥了重要作用，他周二给希望泼了一盆冷水，称任何改变都应该得到共和党的大力支持——尽管没有任何共和党参议员愿意签署。

这让南卡罗来纳州众议员吉姆·克莱伯恩感到困惑，他是众议院第三号民主党人，也是国会黑人核心小组的高级成员。

克莱伯恩质疑反身寻求两党合作的智慧，指出投票权是通过党派投票授予新获得自由的奴隶的。

“他似乎支持阻挠自己的议案，”克莱伯恩谈到曼钦时说。“对我们来说，这非常令人不安。”

Dems switch strategy on voting bill as Biden pushes action

WASHINGTON -- Senate Democrats are trying to force a public showdown over their sweepingelections legislation, aiming to launch debate on a keypartypriority even though there’s no assurance the bill will come to a vote.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer outlined the plan in a memo obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, on the eve of President Joe Biden's visit to meet privately with Senate Democrats about the path forward. It still leaves the Democrats in need of a way to force a vote on the legislation, now blocked by a Republican filibuster.

“We will finally have an opportunity to debate voting rights legislation — something that Republicans have thus far denied,” Schumer wrote in the memo to his Democratic colleagues, which described a workaround to avoid a Republican filibuster that for months has blocked formal debate over the legislation on the Senate floor. “Senators can finally make clear to the American people where they stand on protecting our democracy and preserving the right of every eligible American to cast a ballot.”

The strategy does little to resolve the central problem Democrats face — they lack Republican support to pass theelections legislation on a bipartisan basis, but also don't have support from all 50 Democrats for changing the Senate rules to allow passage on their own. But the latest tactic could create an off-ramp from their initial approach, which was to force a vote by Monday on Senate filibuster changes as a way to pressure Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to go along.

By setting up a debate, Schumer will achieve the Democrats' goal of shining a spotlight that spurs senators to say where they stand. The floor debate could stretch for days and carry echoes of civil rights battles a generation ago that led to some of the most famous filibusters in Senate history.

“I wouldn’t want to delude anybody into thinking this is easy,” Schumer told reporters Wednesday. He called the push an “uphill fight.”

Democrats have vowed to counteract a wave of new state laws, inspired by Donald Trump's false claims of a stolen election, that have made it harder to vote. But after an initial flurry of activity, the Democrats' efforts have stalled in the narrowly divided Senate, where they lack the 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster, leading to their calls for a rule change.

Recently they have tried to breathe new life into the effort. Biden gave a fiery speech in Atlanta on Tuesday, where he told senators they would each be “judged by history” if they failed to act. He is to meet with Democratic senators at the Capitol on Thursday in a bid to jolt the effort forward.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell gave a scathing rebuttal to Biden’s speech Wednesday, objecting to his comparison of opponents of the voting legislation to racist historical figures, including George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who ran for the presidency, and Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the Confederacy.

“You could not invent a better advertisement for the legislative filibuster than what we’ve just seen: a president abandoning rational persuasion for pure demagoguery,” McConnell, R-Ky., said from the Senate floor. “A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the framers built the Senate to check his power. “

Asked Wednesday for a response to McConnell's comments, Biden turned, removed his black mask and said: “I like Mitch McConnell. He’s a friend.” That response came during Biden's trip to the Capitol to pay his respects to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who died last month and was lying in state in the Rotunda.

Republicans are nearly unanimous in opposing the voting legislation, viewing it as federal overreach that would infringe on states' abilities to conduct their own elections. And they’ve pointed out that Democrats opposed changes to the filibuster that Trump sought when he was president.

For Democrats and Biden, the legislation is a political imperative. Failure to pass it would break a major campaign promise to Black voters, who helped hand Democrats control of the White House and Congress, and would come just before midterm elections when slim Democratic majorities will be on the line. It would also be the second major setback for Biden's agenda in a month, after Manchin halted work on the president's $2 trillion package of social and environmental initiatives shortly before Christmas.

The current package of voting and ethics legislation would usher in the biggest overhaul of U.S. elections in a generation, striking down hurdles to voting enacted in the name of election security, reducing the influence of big money in politics and limiting partisan influence over the drawing of congressional districts. The package would create national election standards that would trump the state-level GOP laws. It would also restore the ability of the Justice Department to police election laws in states with a history of discrimination.

Many civil rights activists think Biden's push on voting rights is too-little-too-late in aggressively going after GOP-backed changes in state voting laws, which they view as a subtler form of ballot restrictions like literacy tests and poll taxes once used to disenfranchise Black voters. Some boycotted Biden's speech in Atlanta on Tuesday.

The New Georgia Project, a group founded by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, was among those that called on Biden to skip the speech.

“We’ve heard rhetoric like this before," the group said in a statement. “A goal without a plan is just a wish."

Schumer had set the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, on Jan. 17, as a deadline to either pass the voting legislation or consider revising the filibuster rules. It's unclear if the planned vote on rule changes will still happen.

Manchin, who played a major role writing Democrats' voting legislation, threw cold water on the hopes Tuesday, saying any changes should be made with substantial Republican buy-in — even though there aren’t any Republican senators willing to sign on.

That befuddled South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, the No. 3 Democrat in the House and a senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Clyburn questioned the wisdom of reflexively seeking bipartisanship, noting that the right to vote was granted to newly freed slaves on a party-line vote.

“He seems to be supporting a filibuster of his own bill," Clyburn said of Manchin. “That, to us, is very disconcerting.”