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In a stirring speech from the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., urged conservative members of his party to end their ongoing obstruction of voting rights legislation.
"The judgment of history is upon us," Warnock warned. "Future generations will ask, when the democracy was in a 911 state of emergency, what did you do to put the fire out?"
Though he did not name them in his speech, Warnock's remarks were clearly directed at Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, whose opposition to eliminating the filibuster has blocked the passage of critical election law reforms.
This isn’t the first time Manchin and Sinema have acted as the conservative allies Republicans need to stall President Joe Biden’s agenda. They successfully haggled over the price of the ambitious infrastructure bill passed last month. And now, with Democrats looking to pass their Build Back Better social spending bill before the end of the year, they’re in the perfect position to play the spoiler again right before the holidays.
Warnock referenced their filibuster support in his speech Tuesday:
Here’s the thing we must remember: Slavery was bipartisan. Jim Crow segregation was bipartisan. The refusal of women’s suffrage was bipartisan. The denial of the basic dignity of members of the LGBTQ community has long been bipartisan. The three-fifths compromise was the creation of a putative, national unity at the expense of Black people’s basic humanity. So when colleagues in this chamber talk to me about bipartisanship — which I believe in — I just have to ask, ‘at whose expense?’
Despite presenting their stances as principled, Manchin and Sinema recently voted to raise the debt limit on a party-line vote that required the Senate to temporarily suspend the filibuster. What's more, neither has expressed reservations about the gargantuan 2022 military spending bill that provisions $25 billion more than Biden requested.
In other words, they’re hypocrites.
Or, as Warnock said, “We’re dealing with a consequence of misaligned values and misplaced priorities.”
Check out the clip from Warnock’s speech below. You can watch the full remarks here.
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Head over to The ReidOut Blog for more.