President Joe Biden, in a speech Tuesday in Atlanta, directly challenged the “institution of the United States Senate” to support voting rights by backing two major pieces of legislation and the carving out of an exception to the Senate’s 60-vote requirement, going so far as to compare senators who opposed the legislation to the segregationists of the 1960s.
Coming a week before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Biden’s speech at the Atlanta University Center Consortium on Tuesday afternoon served as a follow-up to a speech he delivered last week on the first anniversary of the U.S. Capitol riot. He argued that the two pieces of legislation ― the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act ― are critical to ensure that the turmoil of Jan. 6, 2021, leads to a revival of American democracy rather than its decline.
