“Have you no shame?”
The president’s words, nearly yelled, echoed off the modern concrete walls onto which a giant red, white, and blue image of the United States flag had been projected. They reverberated down the hallway, past the sleek screens displaying the words “We the People.” They resonated over the exhibits showcasing the nation’s founding documents. And they washed over the people in the crowd, many of them Black, who felt that their arguably most sacred right—one whose torturous path to being achieved was archived all around them—was in more peril than it had been in decades.
President Joe Biden chose the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to be the living backdrop for what would be one of the most consequential and impassioned speeches of his young term. American democracy was under assault; the right to vote was being stripped away. And it was under siege from the same forces that had led to an insurrection that jeopardized the very principles to which the building was devoted.
“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War,” Biden said that July day in 2021. “The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the sixth.”
The rebellion at the Capitol had loomed over Biden’s first six months in office, but the threats that worried Democrats and preoccupied the president were those that had spread out across the nation in the months since the riot. His predecessor’s lies about the 2020 election, his false claims of fraud, had fueled not just the riot, but now a sweeping series of voting restrictions being put in place in statehouses across the nation. In a speech that some allies thought was long overdue, Biden was going to place the defense of the vote at the very center of his presidency in order to push the federal government to protect one of the most fundamental rights of its citizens.
Philadelphia was an easy choice for a venue. Along with Boston, it was one of the centers of the American Revolution and where the foundation for American democracy was laid. Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, was only about a half hour away, with visitors to the region surprised that, spiritually, the city was both a center for corporate headquarters and a suburb of Philadelphia. The very next stop for a northbound Amtrak train boarded at the Joseph R. Biden station in Wilmington was Philadelphia, and Biden, while in Congress, had spent so much time in Philadelphia’s bigger media market—an easier venue from which to raise a national profile—that he was jokingly referred to at the time as “Pennsylvania’s third senator.” His wife, Jill, also made no secret that she hailed from Philadelphia and, as First Lady, would vigorously root for the Phillies, Eagles, Flyers, and 76ers. Along with Pittsburgh to the west, Philadelphia was a totem for Biden, and where he headquartered his campaign. It was fitting, the president frequently said, that Pennsylvania was the state that had pushed him over the 270 Electoral College votes needed to be president.
As senator, Biden would famously take the train back and forth from Washington, but now, as president, he had a better ride. Air Force One touched down a little after 2:00 p.m., and the presidential motorcade quickly wound its way through the sweltering city streets to the Constitution Center. The center had opened on July 4, 2003, built on the northern end of Independence Mall, one of the most historically significant stretches of land in the nation. Just to its south is the Liberty Bell, which, though in truth a fairly underwhelming American landmark, still draws big crowds. And anchoring the other end of the mall stands the far-more-impressive Independence Hall, which was a gathering place for some of the most famous names in American legend: Washington. Hamilton. Franklin. Jefferson.
Those men did not give the right to vote to all Americans, but they took the first steps on that journey there. Biden wanted to make sure that no further backtracking would occur, believing that the defense of voting rights would be—along with the pandemic and healing the wounds caused by Trump—one of the generational challenges his presidency would face. Two federal bills were languishing in Congress. There had been growing rumblings on the Left that he should be using the presidential bully pulpit to do more. There was fierce debate over the future of the Senate filibuster. Biden had weighed in on the Georgia election law debate months before, to no real avail. And since then, more states were enacting restrictions. The Big Lie was not fading. It was gaining steam.
“We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote,” Biden said. “We’re going to face another test in 2022. A new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.… The denial of full and free and fair elections is the most un-American thing that any of us can imagine, the most undemocratic, the most unpatriotic, and yet, sadly, not unprecedented.”
The president took square aim at the new laws, deeming them restrictive and antithetical to American principles. He reviewed the unprecedented efforts to safeguard the election and validate his own victory, noting that rigorous reviews and recounts found no evidence of fraud.
He never mentioned Trump by name but warned about the “bullies and merchants of fear” who trolled in the “darker and more sinister” underbelly of American politics.
“No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Biden said. “The big lie is just that: a big lie.”
His address was met with thunderous applause. Biden lingered for nearly an hour after the speech, which had taken place during a lull in the COVID-19 pandemic, shaking hands and posing for photos. He had delivered the speech with fire but had stopped short of committing to push for a change in the filibuster, which more and more Democrats believed would be the only way to deliver the federal legislation that could override the state restrictions.
The Reverend Al Sharpton watched Biden work the rope line.
In recent years, Sharpton had become one of the most influential voices in the civil rights movement and Democratic Party. He had been a New York City activist—at times a very controversial one—for decades, then became more of a national figure when he briefly ran for president in 2004. His group, the National Action Network, grew in prominence, and Sharpton got an MSNBC show and, sometimes, President Barack Obama’s ear. He became a powerful voice on police injustice and a moving speaker at the funerals of young Black men killed by law enforcement. And both publicly and behind the scenes, Sharpton urged Biden to remember the Black voters who, more than any other group, had put him in office.
Sharpton looked around the Philadelphia museum as Biden posed for selfies. He summoned me and made sure to stress that it was “a good speech.” But he made clear that they would be “just words” if the filibuster didn’t change and the voting restrictions were allowed to remain in place. Sharpton then told me that he had indicated to Biden that “I told him that I was going to stay on him.”
Sharpton looked up toward the podium where Biden had stood earlier to deliver his speech. The presidential seal had been removed but the preamble to the Constitution was still projected behind it.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher.”
A half dozen historians sat around a long table in the White House’s East Room. One by one, they spoke of the most transformative presidents, from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson. Michael Beschloss was there, as were Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham, who had become an unofficial White House adviser. They spoke about what made previous presidents successful and what lessons could be drawn for the present. They pointed to momentous action, not incremental change.
Their audience of one listened. He asked questions. And he agreed. Joe Biden wanted to go big; he wanted to embrace the parallels to FDR and LBJ. He had been elected at a time when the nation faced its greatest array of crises in nearly a century. He pledged to restore unity to a divided country, tame a killer pandemic, and steady a shaky economy.
He made real progress. But his first year in office was almost evenly bifurcated between success and struggle.
In his first six months, he steered the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill to passage, surging funds to American families, schools, and businesses battered by the pandemic. His administration rolled out a massive vaccine distribution program that made the protective shots available to every American just months after they were approved for use. He unveiled a series of economic policies that, by the end of his first year in office, would help cut unemployment from nearly 9 percent on Inauguration Day to under 4 percent a year later.
But in the late summer, the Biden administration was dramatically derailed, thrown off course both by unanticipated events and by political missteps of the administration’s own making. Only weeks after Biden used July 4, 2021, to declare America’s independence from the COVID-19, the lethal and highly transmissible Delta variant raced across the nation, preying largely on the unvaccinated to send death totals and hospitalizations soaring. Much as Trump had politicized masks, a number of Republican governors fought over vaccine mandates, their views echoed by some in the conservative media, including the loudest voice of all, Tucker Carlson. The Biden administration tried everything to urge those on the Right—conservatives were disproportionately dying from COVID—to get vaccines and the new boosters, but the shots had become a political land mine.
Anger flashed on the Right that Biden was infringing on their freedoms. An unlikely chant emerged: “Let’s go Brandon” became a stand-in for “Fuck Joe Biden.” Um, how? It came from, of all places, a flustered NASCAR reporter. She was trying to interview a winning driver—named Brandon Brown—when the anti-Biden expletive started in the crowd and was clearly audible on television. She tried to explain that they were instead chanting “Let’s go Brandon” as a cheer for the driver. It was farcical, and immediately became a rallying cry for the MAGA crowd. One Oregon man even said it to Biden over the phone when the president wished his family a Merry Christmas. There appeared to be no bottom.
Another variant, Omicron, though less deadly, sent cases surging yet again into the new year. Though the deaths were even more concentrated among the unvaccinated, cases skyrocketed everywhere and slowed down the nation’s hopes of returning to normal. And more political danger emerged for the White House, as supply chain shortages and other pandemic-related staffing and labor issues sent inflation spiking. There were whispered Jimmy Carter comparisons as inflation in early 2022 surged to forty-year highs.
And the world watched in horror as the United States’ military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August was filled with images of tumult and violence. Biden had been set on extricating the US forces from Afghanistan since his days as Obama’s vice president. He had fulfilled a campaign promise to end America’s longest war, and public opinion supported him. But while the United States eventually oversaw one of the biggest airlifts in history to evacuate Americans and some allied Afghans, the opening days of its exit were full of horrors. The worst: a suicide bomb that killed thirteen American troops and at least 170 Afghans at Kabul’s airport.
The combination of setbacks punctured what had been the new White House’s central image of competency; the impression that after Trump’s chaos, the grown-ups were back in charge. By any measure, Biden’s first year in office had extraordinary successes, particularly given the difficult hand he had been dealt. Yet he ended it undeniably weaker than he began, with his poll numbers having plummeted and his party in danger of being swept out of power on Capitol Hill.
And hovering over all of it was the shadow of January 6 and the man who inspired it. Biden candidly told aides that he knew what was at stake, that he had to prove that American democracy could still deliver for its people. And he thought the way to do that was to make a good-faith effort at bipartisanship. Biden believed in American democracy, but he also believed in American government. He knew that some of the most diehard MAGA Republicans were lost causes, but he believed in his heart that there were enough in the GOP who would work together to protect something bigger than any one political party.
He tried to reach across the aisle and mostly found obstruction. And some of his most stubborn obstacles were within his own party.
What followed was more than half a year devoted to an ultimately failed legislative push, an effort that dominated the president’s time and political capital at the expense of a press for voting rights. And as a distracted White House only intermittently unleashed its power on protecting the ballot, a pattern was established: the same Democratic senators who felt comfortable defying their party leader to doom Biden’s social spending agenda would do so again to block his efforts on the vote.
Biden lived and breathed the Senate.
He had spent nearly four decades there, followed its traditions, and longed for the days when senators could talk to each other as people, not just political rivals. He had missed out on some of the Capitol Hill evening hobnobbing that, for some lawmakers, defined the job; Biden instead would take the train back to Delaware each night to care for his family still reeling from that terrible car accident. But he was glad he did. The time in Wilmington kept him grounded, he long said; it made sure he didn’t become a creature of Washington, even though so much of his life was lived inside the Beltway. He thought often of Beau, the memory of whom acted as a north star for some of the president’s most important decisions. Biden was the most tactile of politicians: he liked a backslap and a handshake and asking about the other person’s mother. And he prized the relationships he built with some of the most arch-conservatives in Congress: Trent Lott. Chuck Grassley. Even Mitch McConnell. He saw those bonds as proof that the Senate could still blur party lines to get things done.
Biden never lost hope that some Republicans, looking at a pandemic-ravaged nation, would set aside party politics to embrace parts of his agenda. He was disappointed that no one in the GOP backed his COVID-19 relief bill when it passed in the spring of 2021. His White House was fond of the claim that the bill was, in essence, bipartisan because it polled well with Republican voters, even though not a single GOP lawmaker in Washington voted for it. But plenty of GOP governors and local leaders supported it, and soon even those who worked on Capitol Hill took to touting the benefits from the relief bill even though they didn’t vote for it. That hypocrisy didn’t sit well with Biden, who took to carrying around a notecard listing the Republican lawmakers who extolled the virtues of the bill without casting a vote for it.
Biden was also dismayed by the GOP pushback to what he thought were commonsense public safety measures like masks. He initially didn’t want vaccine mandates either, but the Delta variant changed his thinking and he didn’t understand why Republicans didn’t follow suit. And he was disgusted that so many in the Republican Party blocked the formation of the January 6 commission; he took to saying privately that the GOP was so beholden to Trump that “it wasn’t a real party anymore.”
But infrastructure, he thought, was the one thing they could agree upon. It had been a bipartisan embarrassment for decades, as Democrats and Republicans alike could see the nation’s crumbling highways and bridges. Airports were outdated; too many pipes seeped lead into the drinking water; schools and ports were falling apart. The Trump administration had tried to pivot toward infrastructure several times but its efforts at doing so—branded “Infrastructure Week”—inevitably failed, overwhelmed by controversies usually of the president’s own making. “Infrastructure Week” became a Washington joke, and one Biden himself enjoyed.
Considering his blue-collar background and longtime associations with trains, as well as his relationships with some in the GOP caucus, Biden believed he was the president to get a bill over the finish line. But it wouldn’t just be a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The White House wanted to pair it with a $3.5 trillion social spending plan that would reshape the government’s relationship with its citizens, dramatically expanding the social services safety net and lifting tens of thousands of Americans out of poverty. It set out to broaden well-known programs—for example, adding dental, vision, and hearing aid benefits to Medicare and continuing the Obama-era health law’s temporary subsidies that helped people buy insurance during the pandemic.
The “Build Back Better” plan, as it was dubbed by the White House, would be one of the most expansive government spending programs ever and key, Democrats believed, to keeping control of Congress in 2022. They planned to pass it with a congressional trick known as budget reconciliation, which would allow them to do it on a party-line vote. But, of course, since they had only fifty Senate votes—with Vice President Kamala Harris set to break the tie—they couldn’t afford to lose a single Democrat. That, in turn, gave each single Democratic senator extraordinary power over the proceedings; and a few senators soon made clear they planned to use it.
The White House charted the course: it would get a bipartisan infrastructure deal through Congress first, then move to Build Back Better. And once the massive legislation agenda was passed, Biden would turn toward voting rights. But he didn’t ignore voting rights completely. In June, he traveled to Tulsa, the city Trump had alienated the year before by trying to hold his comeback rally on Juneteenth. Biden arrived to mark the hundredth anniversary of the race massacre that had destroyed a thriving Black community in that Oklahoma city. He declared that he had “to help fill the silence” about one of the nation’s darkest—and long-suppressed—moments of racial violence.
“Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try,” Biden said. “Only with truth can come healing.”
In 1921, a white mob, including some people hastily deputized by authorities, looted and burned Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which was referred to as Black Wall Street. As many as three hundred Black Tulsans were killed, and thousands of survivors were forced into internment camps overseen by the National Guard. Burned bricks and a small piece of a church basement were about all that survived of the historically Black district that had stretched over more than thirty blocks.
“Just because history is silent, it does not mean that it did not take place,” said Biden, in a deeply emotional speech that left many in the audience blinking back tears. And he connected the moment to the ongoing struggle to protect the ballot, announcing that Harris would lead the administration’s voting rights efforts.
It was a start. But then the movement was again placed on the back burner, not to take center stage again until after the congressional spending negotiations. A growing number of Democrats and civil rights activists worried that it would be too late.
For a while, things seemed to be going according to plan.
It was, by any estimation, a slog to get the bipartisan infrastructure deal done. There was some momentum for a few weeks behind a deal put forth by the junior senator from West Virginia, Shelley Moore Capito. Biden got heavily involved, talking to senators on both sides of the aisle. He had been frustrated earlier in the year, when the pandemic had made it impossible to safely host lawmakers at the White House. He had learned to hate remote meetings, both domestically and with foreign leaders. For most of his career, Biden was used to trotting the globe, first as part of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and then as vice president. He had always envisioned a possible presidency that way, but he was older now and the toll of the travel was real. And White House aides were leery of any circumstance that could put him at risk of exposure to the virus. Biden understood, but he hated it: “I can’t do diplomacy by fucking Zoom,” he’d complained to aides more than once.
But the early weeks of summer offered a respite: he was able to take his first foreign trip, to world leader summits on England’s Cornwall coast and in Brussels, and then to a high-stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva. He was greeted in Europe with a sigh of relief by Western leaders: he was not Trump. And Geneva was no Helsinki: Biden warned the Russian leader against any election interference by cyberattack. Putin, for his part, smiled quietly while his security guards forcibly pushed me and other reporters out of the summit room for trying to ask him questions. Deals were made between allies over global vaccine distribution; NATO was recommitted to. There was still some underlying anxiety among the Europeans that perhaps Biden would be an aberration, that an isolationist “America First” foreign policy could return in four years with Trump or someone like him. But for now, they celebrated a return to normalcy even as concerns would soon grow as to what Putin might be planning.
And Biden was able to finally host senators at the White House and have them fan out around his chair in the Oval Office. Though he had spent much of his adult life trying to get there, it turned out Biden didn’t really like living at the White House all that much. He found it stiff and formal, “like a museum.” He didn’t like staff being present at all hours to wait on him; he much preferred to just shuffle over to the kitchen himself to get some late-night ice cream. The then seventy-eight-year-old chief executive much preferred his house back in Delaware, with his family nearby, some favorite restaurants, and the familiar features of home. Much to the chagrin of the traveling White House press pool, Biden favored heading to his home in Wilmington more weekends than not.
But the White House still carried with it a lot of power, and Biden knew it was undeniably useful as a leveraging tool to get things done. So there he was, bursting through the doors of the West Wing, past the marine standing guard, to make a surprise appearance on the White House driveway with a bipartisan group of senators. He had an infrastructure deal. Or at least the start of one.
“When we can find common ground, working across party lines, that is what I will seek to do,” said Biden on that sunny June 2021 day. He deemed the infrastructure agreement “a true bipartisan effort, breaking the ice that too often has kept us frozen in place.”
The bill’s price tag was $973 billion over five years, or $1.2 trillion over eight years, and it was a scaled-back but still central piece of Biden’s agenda. And it was indeed a bipartisan effort: Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, was a driving force, and in the end the bill would collect nineteen GOP votes, including Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, and, at the last minute, Mitch McConnell. It was just step one: the reconciliation bill would come later. But it was a triumph for Biden and a reaffirmation of his belief that he could still reach across the aisle. That was the hard part, his aides thought. It gets easier from here.
They were wrong. Democrats would prove to be a surprise obstacle, given the competition between the liberal and moderate wings in the House, and two stubborn senators in particular. And as the Big Lie picked up steam in the states, that trouble would soon spill over in his push to battle the coming storm over voting rights.
Biden was tired of Joe Manchin.
To be clear, the two men were friends. They had a fine relationship, shared a folksy style. And Biden could live with political disagreement. That came with the job. White House aides were keenly aware of the dynamic at play: Manchin had pulled off the unlikely feat of getting elected as a Democrat in one of the reddest states in the country—three times as senator and twice before that as governor. In fact, only Wyoming had voted for Trump at a higher rate in 2020 than West Virginia. And Manchin was happy to remind his Senate colleagues and White House aides that, in essence, if they didn’t like dealing with him, they could deal with the Republican who would follow him. He made clear, as he had during the COVID-19 relief bill debate months earlier, that he would only vote for what he could explain to his constituents back home. It wasn’t clear how he explained the houseboat he docked along the Potomac or the Maserati he drove. But Manchin was also very much aware of the power that he, or any Democratic senator, now wielded in a fifty–fifty chamber of Congress.
And Manchin loved being the center of attention.
Even before his newfound power in 2021, Manchin was not shy about hopping on camera. He was quick to do television interviews, eager to supply a quote to the Capitol Hill reporters lingering in hallways. He would quietly work as an unnamed source for print reporter and TV anchor alike. And suddenly, he was in demand and in the conversation like never before. As was another, unlikelier, senator.
Kyrsten Sinema was once so liberal that the Democratic Party wasn’t lefty enough for her. As she came of age politically, she joined the Green Party and worked for Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential bid. After a failed run for office, she switched to the Democratic Party and was elected first to the Arizona state legislature and then to Congress. She was a triathlete and bisexual. She began to moderate her politics, driving hard to the center and associating with other Blue Dog Democrats. And then, after Trump bullied Jeff Flake out of the Senate, Sinema took a run at his open seat and secured a win in 2018. She modeled herself in some ways on the legendary Arizona senator John McCain in that she prized herself for being unpredictable, a real maverick. But her ideology, at times, seemed less than consistent, making her more like an enigma. And as much as Manchin loved the media spotlight, Sinema shied away from it—she rarely gave interviews outside of her home state press.
The two of them couldn’t be more different. But they soon became linked, as “Manchin and Sinema” or “Sinema and Manchin” (Manchinema?) were uttered together in one breath on cable news shows and among frustrated Democrats. And that’s because they emerged as a huge roadblock to getting Biden’s agenda through Congress.
Biden himself confused matters when, after the bipartisan infrastructure deal passed, he endorsed explicitly linking it to the social spending agenda. That was Nancy Pelosi’s plan: she didn’t want to pass one without the other. She had to try to keep her moderates and liberals in line. The moderates wanted to go ahead and pass the Senate’s infrastructure deal first, then move on to the bigger spending package. Conversely, the liberals feared that doing so would cost them all their leverage; they worried that if they passed the infrastructure deal, the moderates on Capitol Hill—namely, Manchin—would walk away from the $3.5 trillion package. They wanted the two bills done at once, and when Biden voiced support for the plan, it outraged Republicans who had backed the infrastructure deal; they didn’t want their votes for one package to be linked to the other, Democrats-only bill. This, of course, was all theater: the Democrats were going to try to pass both bills. But Biden backed off such an explicit endorsement.
The subsequent negotiations over the two bills showed the limits of comparing Biden to Roosevelt or Johnson. Both of those presidents had been blessed with huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Biden had a fifty–fifty Senate and only a slim margin in the House. Biden himself, though a veteran legislator, was at times too deferential, some aides thought, to the competing interests on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The presidency was a bully pulpit: at some point, some of his closest advisers pressed, it was time to demand that your party back your agenda. But in his multiple trips to the Capitol, Biden listened more than cajoled, and the bills stalled.
Manchin pushed for the Build Back Better bill to shrink, which it eventually did, to around $2 trillion. His asks—some to Biden, some to Chuck Schumer—kept changing, but the answer he kept coming back with was “no.” High-wire negotiations stretched late on many nights in the fall of 2021, and while a deal was struck to keep the government open, Manchin still refused to move on the spending program. It was a standoff that threatened to subsume the Biden administration.
Eventually, the progressives in the House blinked. Time and again, they proved far more willing to compromise than their conservative counterparts and, in early November, they passed the infrastructure bill in the belief that good-faith negotiations would get the larger social spending bill done too. Biden had a win, he signed the infrastructure bill into law, and federal dollars would soon begin flowing to construction projects all over the nation. And a few days later, the House passed $2.2 trillion in spending over the next decade to battle climate change, expand health care, and reweave the nation’s social safety net. The bill’s passage, 220 to 213, came after weeks of cajoling, arm-twisting, and legislative flexibility. It received no Republican votes and even faced a record-breaking more than eight-hour speech from Kevin McCarthy as he voiced his objections. Like most things McCarthy did, it was aimed to get the approval of one man, and Trump registered his appreciation.
Passage of these bills had taken an enormous amount of time and political capital. And it had come at the cost of other things: the more time and energy the White House poured into its legislative agenda, the less it was able to devote to combating “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” The rumblings from civil rights activists about the lack of action on voting rights was growing louder. Sharpton, NAACP president Derrick Johnson, and several other civil rights leaders had gone to the White House in July to meet with Biden and Harris. They voiced their concerns, including that the filibuster loomed as an insurmountable obstacle.
“Time is of the essence. We cannot forget that justice is an ongoing struggle, and democracy an ongoing fight,” Johnson said.
“This is an attack on a very fundamental value that undergirds this country. When we look at what’s happening in this nation, we see an effort to impose a system, American apartheid,” said Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League.
But they were told to be patient, to let the administration get through the Build Back Better agenda first, and that then voting rights would be the priority. And it finally seemed like that was about to happen. The Democrats, despite all the fits and starts and struggles, were on track.
Until they weren’t.
It wasn’t just what Manchin said. It was where he said it.
The West Virginia senator stared into the Fox News Sunday camera on December 19, 2021, and surprised the host that day, Bret Baier, with his candor. After five and a half months of tortuous negotiations among Democrats in which he was his party’s chief obstacle to passage, Manchin was pulling the plug on Build Back Better and dealing a potentially fatal blow to Biden’s leading domestic initiative heading into an election year when Democrats’ narrow hold on Congress was already in peril.
“I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t. I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there.”
Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, muttered an expletive under his breath and called his staff. This was a disaster and he needed to get to the bottom of what went wrong, he said. He then called Biden. The president greeted the news with a similar expletive—he was far more foul-mouthed off camera than you’d expect—and was furious that Manchin had stabbed him and the party in the back. He knew Manchin was waffling; in fact, just a few days before, the senator had said he wanted to delay proceeding with the bill until more was known about rising inflation, which he had made his number one concern.
Biden wasn’t thrilled with that delay but signaled his support for it. White House staff had then given Manchin a heads-up that the president would soon put out a statement accepting a delay in the Build Back Better Act and that it was going to mention the West Virginia senator by name. Manchin objected, asking either that his name be left out or that he not be singled out, because his family had already been the target of abuse.
But the statement went out anyway, and the only name it contained was Manchin’s. The senator then snapped at White House aides and told them he was done negotiating. The West Wing interpreted that as meaning that current talks were done but could pick up again next year. But Manchin meant that he was totally walking away—which he said publicly a few days later on Fox News Sunday. Those at the White House were blindsided and furious, not just that Manchin had pulled the plug but that he had done so on Fox, which had spent the entire year, they felt, working to undermine their agenda. It was a slap in the face.
Biden took the high road and called Manchin that night. The two men spoke amiably, and each left the conversation thinking that the door was still open to negotiation on the package. But talks didn’t resume right away, and a number of congressional aides began seeing if different pieces of the bill—perhaps lowering the cost of prescription drugs or making child care affordable—could be spun off into smaller pieces of legislation.
In February, Manchin was asked the status of talks on Build Back Better. He nearly scoffed.
“What Build Back Better bill? There is no, I mean, I don’t know what you all are talking about,” Manchin said. “No, no, no, no, it’s dead.”
The bipartisan infrastructure deal was now law and a clear victory for the president and public. But months had been spent on Build Back Better, yielding nothing. An effort to take up a smaller, limited version of the bill could be considered for later in 2022 but would only get harder to pass closer to the midterms. Biden’s approval rating had plummeted to the upper thirties, a slide that began with Afghanistan and was accelerated by the pummeling that the Delta and Omicron variant waves dealt the nation. Inflation was surging and, polling revealed, Americans were sick of the gridlock and infighting on Capitol Hill.
Biden was at a low point. And then he faced an uprising.
“The judgment of history is upon us,” the preacher proclaimed. “Future generations will ask, when the democracy was in a 911 state of emergency, what did you do to put the fire out?”
Raphael Warnock, who delivered sermons from the pulpit that once belonged to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was unleashing fire and brimstone from the floor of the United States Senate. The senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Warnock was now a senator from Georgia, elected January 5, 2021. He stared at his Senate colleagues on December 14, 2021, and declared that he had had enough, that it was time to act. He had been in office only eleven months, he was due to face voters again in another eleven months, and his state had imposed the most publicized set of voting restrictions in the nation.
And he didn’t want to hear anything more about the filibuster.
Though he didn’t mention them by name, Warnock aimed his verbal daggers at two of his Democratic colleagues, Senators Manchin and Sinema, who had both said that they would not vote to change the filibuster to pass federal voting rights legislation without bipartisan support. But not enough Republicans, of course, were willing to back such a move, so the two Democrats refused to play along even though their own party—and the nation’s democracy writ large—stood to suffer. Warnock seethed that it was an empty commitment to bipartisanship—and that reaching across the aisle had not always led to virtuous results.
“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,” Warnock thundered.
“The three-fifths compromise was the creation of a putative, national unity at the expense of Black people’s basic humanity,” he continued, referencing the constitutional clause that rendered a Black man less of a citizen than a white one. “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 had voted just a short time before to raise the debt limit on a party-line vote that required the Senate to temporarily suspend the filibuster. Warnock, who many pundits felt faced an uphill battle to keep his Senate seat in November 2022, blasted the reversal as “a consequence of misaligned values and misplaced priorities.”
An intraparty fight over voting rights had engulfed the Democratic Party not even a year after the Capitol insurrection. As Republicans put in place new voting restrictions in states across the country, civil rights activists watched with growing alarm as the White House and congressional leadership prioritized the Build Back Better agenda instead. But that had crashed against the rocks, and the window for meaningful action was already starting to narrow: with the midterms looming in November 2022, lawmakers had only a few months to legislate before they wanted to focus on campaigning. Congress’s calendar, as always, was short and cynical.
But civil rights leaders drew a line in the sand. A number of leading Black activists made clear, in no uncertain terms, that they were tired of being taken for granted. Black voters had, in large part, delivered Biden the White House and Democrats the Congress. But their ability to vote was being threatened, and nothing, they felt, was being done about it.
They set a deadline: they demanded to see real action by the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in mid-January. And if the Democrats didn’t meet it, they couldn’t count on Black support again.
“An inaction at this point would lead to an inaction of Black voters. People are saying, ‘If they don’t do this, I’m not voting,’” the Reverend Al Sharpton said to me at the time. “People are saying they feel betrayed.
“The time is now. The urgency could not be more palpable than it is now.”
But familiar obstacles stood in the way.
The filibuster is not in the Constitution.
The Senate rule, at its essence, gives senators the right to derail votes with, in theory, indefinite debate. Before 1917, there was no way to end debate. But that year, a new Senate rule was put in place that allowed a two-thirds majority to end a filibuster and prompt a vote, a procedure known as “cloture.” In 1975, that was lowered to three-fifths of the Senate—which is why there is a de facto sixty-vote threshold for laws to pass the Senate.
But in the middle of the twentieth century, the filibuster was the final weapon of Southern Democrats who were battling to preserve segregation and Jim Crow practices in their states. They wielded it to water down or eliminate various civil rights bills until 1964 and 1965, when a coalition of Republicans and Democrats outside the South—wrangled by President Lyndon Johnson—found enough votes to break it. But when the threshold was lowered to sixty votes a decade later, it inadvertently led to a far more frequent use of “extended debate” or the threat of the filibuster. Senators were no longer required to hold the floor for hours, so the gauzy drama of all-night sessions that might last for weeks vanished. And senators in both parties came to embrace the filibuster, or the threat to filibuster, as just another tool.
The filibuster empowered senators, particularly those in the minority. Without it, the Democrats could pass legislation—including on voting rights—with a simple up-and-down majority vote, with Harris breaking the tie. And in some cases, including on reconciliation budget bills or when the filibuster was waived, sixty votes weren’t needed.
But that number would need to be hit for the two voting bills that languished before the Senate.
The first was given the name House Resolution 1 in the Congress that came to office in January 2021, a sign that it was the Democrats’ top priority. Known as HR1 or the “For the People Act,” the bill was a sweeping overhaul of how elections were conducted and financed. It was a broad and transformative bill that would have, among other things, created a national automatic system for registering voters and established national standards for mail-in and absentee ballots. Voter ID laws would be tossed aside, and bipartisan commissions would be created to draw the lines for legislative districts so that redistricting wouldn’t favor either major party. The bill would also provide public money for campaigns and prohibit shielding the identity of dark money voters.
It was a sweeping measure intended to rewrite the way the nation votes. And it had no chance of passing.
The bill was written when Democrats were out of power, and at its heart it was what is known as “a messaging bill,” an idea for candidates to tout on the campaign trail but not really crafted in a way to pass a divided Congress. Manchin—yes, him again—made clear in June 2021 that the bill went too far and his opposition quickly scuttled it.
But the West Virginia senator did indicate that he supported most of what was in House Resolution 4, which was known as HR4 or, better yet, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, named after the legendary congressman and civil rights leader who died in July 2020. It was a comparatively narrow bill designed to fix a specific problem, in this case the 2013 Supreme Court ruling that had weakened the Voting Rights Act by making it harder for the federal government to block racially discriminatory voting laws and redistricting.
Democrats outraged by that Supreme Court decision—known as the Shelby County (Alabama) v. Holder case—missed something subtle. In Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion, he didn’t close the door to the measure, nor did the ruling overturn the Voting Rights Act’s ban on discriminatory voting rules. Instead, it gave Congress the opportunity to draft new, updated rules—based on present conditions and not the ones dating from the 1960s—to determine which states or local governments should be subject to preclearance. In other words, the ruling didn’t end the law, it just asked Congress to fix it. And that’s what the John Lewis Act was set to do. The measure also would make it easier for the Justice Department to send election observers, to safeguard that votes were tabulated and certified correctly, and for courts to block election law changes that violated the constitutional protections guaranteeing voting rights for all US citizens.
This bill was far more palatable to moderate Democrats and, potentially, had an outside chance of passing. Manchin over the summer offered his own version, which watered down some of the package but kept many of its core principles. And even in a reduced version, it would still offer far greater voter protections than what was available at the moment. But the voting conundrum remained: Either Manchin needed to find ten Republicans to support it to reach the sixty votes needed to pass or the filibuster would have to change. Otherwise, nothing would happen.
Republicans were not going to let voting rights pass with just fifty votes plus the vice president, so it would require elimination of the filibuster in what has become known as “the nuclear option.” Or, at the very least, an exception to the filibuster would need to be carved out for voting rights, as had been done on occasion to raise the debt ceiling and confirm federal judges. Manchin and Sinema expressed public doubts; other Democrats did so privately. In order to change their minds, it would likely require a push from someone who served nearly four decades in the Senate and venerated all its institutions, including the filibuster.
It took him a while. But Joe Biden got there.
In his first months in office, Biden made clear that he was inclined to leave the Senate rule alone. But as the months passed and election bills ended up on the calendars of state legislatures across the country, Biden’s views evolved. In October, he said in a town hall that he would consider making a one-time change to the filibuster. And then in December, as the civil rights groups laid down their ultimatum, he went further.
“If the only thing standing between getting voting rights legislation passed and not getting passed is the filibuster, I support making the exception of voting rights for the filibuster,” Biden said in an interview with ABC.
And thus began, at long last, the White House’s all-out push on voting rights. It was, at last, a practicable piece of policy that could push back on the Big Lie.
With the Build Back Better Act sidelined and the pressure from the Left mounting, the White House mapped out a sprint to put voting rights at the center of its agenda as the calendar prepared to turn to 2022. The clock was ticking to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and some Black activists said they would ramp up their criticism of Democrats—and perhaps abstain from campaigning for them in the midterms—if progress was not made.
“I don’t want to become too dramatic,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, told Politico, “but voting rights may be the only thing we have to at least halt the trek away from democracy.”
“I just want us to get a bill done that will help preserve this democracy because if we don’t, I think we’ve lost this democracy,” Jim Clyburn said.
Even though its public approach to voting rights was somewhat scattershot, the White House had been working diligently on the matter behind the scenes since Biden took office. Weekly staff meetings were held on the topic, and senior leadership calls were set up to discuss ways to protect election results and to assess possible pathways to federal legislation while monitoring developments in the states. Grassroots campaigns were encouraged to restore the American public’s confidence in the nation’s elections, to try to undo some of the damage Trump had wrought. Yet even though it animated elements of the Left, voting rights never polled very high as a major issue among most people, according to internal numbers from surveys conducted by Biden allies. Some in the president’s inner circle speculated privately that a legislative defeat on voting rights might even be politically advantageous, since the fear of further GOP ballot restrictions might drive Democratic turnout in the 2022 midterms.
All along, a focus had emerged on the states; Biden aides grimly joked that the president had been in office for a year and was still facing local recounts and efforts to decertify his win. “Maybe one of these years we’ll really win Arizona,” one staffer joked to reporters. The West Wing knew it had to pick and choose which fights it wanted to litigate, for fear of being bogged down in court for years. Biden expressed worry about threats to election volunteers, while some of his closest aides monitored the unprecedented GOP interest in state races like secretary of state.
But while the White House knew that some of the electoral battles would need to be fought on the state level, federal legislation would be the best solution. Aides also recognized that a full-court press on voting rights—even if it was good politics—would be doomed to fail without a change to the filibuster. And while they had some skepticism that they could bring reluctant Democrats on board for such changes, they hoped a fierce push from the president on filibuster reform might help. HR1 was never an option, but there was a flicker of life to the smaller package. Aides settled on a multipronged approach: senior White House staffers would begin pushing lawmakers behind the scenes, while Biden was to start 2022 by delivering a major voting rights speech in Georgia, arguably the most important state on the electoral map as well as ground zero for efforts to restrict access to the ballot.
But first, there was one other moment to make the case.
Riot shields were now propped up around entrances to the Capitol. Metal detectors were installed, to stand guard outside entrances to the House and Senate floors. Capitol police officers patrolling the complex were still wearing black armbands memorializing their fallen colleagues.
Republicans in Congress have, so far, blocked an official display at the Capitol to commemorate the riot that took place on January 6, 2021. But exactly one year later, there were still reminders everywhere of the violence that came to that hallowed place, nearly tearing apart the nation’s democracy while leaving many who were there that day still grappling with the trauma.
Precisely one year after a mob stormed the Capitol to try to prevent the certification of his election, President Joe Biden strode into National Statuary Hall, which had been invaded by throngs of Trump supporters wielding flags as weapons and threatening unspeakable violence. There had been some debate among his aides as to how to mark the day, and some advisers encouraged a small, quiet remembrance so as not to elevate the lies that had fueled that violence. But Biden chose a different path. He wanted to eviscerate those lies. And the man who told them.
“And here is the truth of it: the former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election,” Biden said. “He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interests as more important than his country’s interests and America’s interests, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution.
“He can’t accept he lost.”
Biden, as was his custom, didn’t use Trump’s name. He didn’t have to. His entire speech was aimed squarely at his predecessor in an effort to both push back against the Big Lie and to warn the nation that the threat from the former president and his followers remained undiminished. Other Democrats joined in.
“It was Donald Trump’s big lie that soaked our political landscape in kerosene,” Schumer said. “It was Donald Trump’s rally on the Mall that struck the match. And then came the fire.”
Though he had spent much of the past year trying to ignore Trump and work across the aisle, most of Biden’s efforts at bipartisanship had faltered because the GOP showed no interest. He took a different path at the Capitol, swiping at the GOP by offering his most extended rebuttal of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, noting that multiple recounts, court battles, and inquiries had turned up no meaningful fraud. The president dismissed the rants of—and he reveled in saying this—“a defeated former president” and noted that Republicans had not challenged GOP victories for Congress and governorships based on the same balloting they claimed was illegitimate in the presidential race.
But there were no signs that many Republicans would turn away from their stance on the election. Few lawmakers even bothered to be in Washington for the insurrection commemoration, and only one elected official—Representative Liz Cheney—took part in a moment of silence put on by Democrats to remember those lost. She was joined by her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, who was greeted warmly by some of the same Democrats who once called him a war criminal. At least on this, the Democrats thought, Cheney was on the right side of history.
Other Republicans accused Biden of trying to overstate what happened a year earlier while trying to exploit the moment for political gain. Trump had initially considered holding a news conference that day but was talked out of it by aides who convinced him that his efforts at counterprogramming probably would not get the media attention he hoped. He released a statement instead.
“This political theater is all just a distraction for the fact Biden has completely and totally failed,” Trump wrote. “The Democrats want to own this day of January 6 so they can stoke fears and divide America. I say, let them have it because America sees through theirs [sic] lies and polarizations.”
Biden, in his speech, tried to reject efforts to rewrite history and cast the attackers as patriots. His frustration rising, his voice grew louder as he excoriated “those who stormed this Capitol and those who instigated and incited and those who called on them to do so.”
He added later: “I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”
Biden had tried to steer his nation out of a once-in-a-century pandemic. He had pushed through two huge pieces of legislation to better American lives, though he’d fallen short on a third. His administration was centered on trying to restore faith in American democracy, and he seemingly couldn’t reach half the country. Not because they couldn’t hear him. Because they chose not to listen. They didn’t think he was legitimate. And they believed others.
The threat remained. The Big Lie had become policy. Trump’s power had not abated.
A year had passed since January 6. Little had changed.