Biden vowed to make racial justice the heart of his agenda – is it still beating? | US politics

Despite the harsh August heat, Rev Al Sharpton recently led a gathering of thousands of people through the streets of the nation’s capital on the 58th anniversary of the March on Washington as Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963.

Their march was urgent then as now. In state houses across the country, Republicans are proposing – and passing – new election restrictions that activists say represent the greatest erosion of voting rights since the 1965 Suffrage Bill was passed, a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.

In a speech near the White House, Sharpton recalled Joe Biden’s Victory Night promise to wage the “great fight” for racial justice. The time to fight has come, the Reverend told Biden.

“You said the night you won that Black America had your back and that you were going to have the back of the Black Americans,” Sharpton said. “Well, Mr. President, they are stabbing us in the back.”

Since taking office, Biden has placed racial justice at the center of his government agenda and embedded a language that promotes justice in his ordinances, policy proposals and public speeches. “The dream of justice for all will no longer be postponed,” he promised in his inaugural address. “We can create racial justice.”

The escalating battle for voting rights, however, underscores the difficulty Biden faces in his efforts to advance racial justice. It is an issue that is vital to its legacy, but it faces myriad political and legal obstacles. From voting rights to police reforms to supporting black farmers and other critical issues, Biden’s Racial Justice Agenda has suffered a variety of setbacks and delays in his first year in office.

Despite control of the White House and Congress, the Democrats have yet to pass two federal election bills, which are at the heart of the party’s strategy to roll back new electoral restrictions in Republican-led states.

A voting rally in the White House last month. Photo: Allison Bailey / NurPhoto / Rex / Shutterstock

Bills include the For the People Act, a major overhaul of federal electoral laws that would expand early voting, automatic, same-day registration, and prevent severe tampering with county boundaries for partisan gain; and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore critical portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after Supreme Court rulings gutted the law.

“To tackle 400 years of racial oppression in this country, you must first protect the rights of all citizens, especially African-Americans, to fully participate in our democracy,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP.

“All public order grows out of this overarching right to vote,” he added. “If you suppress the right to vote, you cannot advance public order to remove the systemic barriers.”

In a speech to commemorate the 100th, in a second speech earlier this summer, he condemned Republicans’ efforts to restrict voting rights as “the most important test of our democracy since the civil war” and urged lawmakers to act.

But the bills remain stalled in the evenly-divided Senate, where the filibuster needs 60 votes to move the legislation forward. The lack of progress has frustrated civil rights activists and activists who accuse the president of not taking the struggle for the right to vote seriously enough.

“What we’ve seen so far in action doesn’t match the passion of the president or the rhetoric of the vice president,” said Nsé Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project. “It doesn’t match the intensity of their speeches and it certainly doesn’t match the urgency of this moment.”

Ufot is part of a coalition of civil rights activists who are pressuring Biden to invest the same political capital and urgency in voting rights as he faces other problems like infrastructure and troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

You say the President and Democrats are wasting valuable time convincing Republicans to support the bills. Instead, they are calling on the party to eliminate the filibuster altogether or create an exemption from the filibuster that allows voting laws to pass a party-line vote without Republican support.

“The question is, when are we going to talk about the filibuster and get rid of it?” said Ufot. “Because that seems like the only way to do it.”

Senator Arizona Kyrsten Sinema has steadfastly refused to make any changes to the filibuster. Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo / EPA

Biden and the White House have countered the criticism, citing the Senate Democrats’ lack of support to further fight the filibuster. At least two senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, are reluctant to restrict the use of the filibuster – the very same means the Republicans used to block the For the People Act review earlier this summer.

The narrow majorities of the Democrats have made progress on other aspects of his racist agenda just as difficult.

Biden’s deadline for passing a law reforming the federal police force by the first anniversary of the murder of George Floyd has not been met because legislators have repeatedly failed to reach consensus. Negotiations are ongoing, but the outlook remains bleak.

The measures to eradicate historical inequalities contained in his infrastructure proposal were cut under a bipartisan agreement backed by the president – including a $ 20 billion initiative to repair the damage caused decades ago by the construction of highways in black and Latin American communities caused, on only 1. The plan also cut a $ 400 billion proposal to improve long-term care for elderly and disabled Americans. The program would have helped raise wages for caregivers, who are mostly black women.

Conservative lawyers are also closely monitoring the actions of the Biden government. Legal challenges have hampered some of the government’s attempts to promote racial justice.

That summer, a federal judge halted a federal program that would cancel the debts of black farmers after generations of racial discrimination. The hold was in response to lawsuits from white farmers who said the program was unfair and discriminatory. In another legal challenge, white business owners have successfully challenged an administrative policy to prioritize applicants for pandemic aid grants from women and black people. As a result, nearly 3,000 priority applicants have had their grants revoked.

Last month, the Supreme Court rejected the Biden administration’s recent attempt to extend a state moratorium on evictions that disproportionately affected Black and Latino families during the pandemic.

Yet the obstacles have not prevented the government from advancing on other fronts.

Many civil rights activists were encouraged by Joe Biden’s nomination for a mixed cabinet. Photo: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Many civil rights activists were encouraged by Biden’s opening act as president. He appointed one of the most diverse cabinets in history, including the first black and Asian American female vice president; and he signed a series of executive orders aimed at making racial equality a “responsibility of our entire government.” These included measures to combat housing discrimination, the gradual abolition of the use of private prisons by the Justice Department, the repeal of a Trump-era commission that sought to minimize the role of slavery in the founding of the country to ensure fair distribution of vaccines and expand voting rights. In June, Biden signed law establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

And the $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan that Biden pushed through in March unleashed billions of dollars in aid to poor families, driving dramatic reductions in poverty, especially for black and Latin American families.

And in July, the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, announced that it would sue Georgia over a comprehensive electoral law on the grounds that the measure discriminated against black voters.

The right to vote, proponents say, is the most important test of whether Biden can deliver on his promise to fight systemic racism in America. The consequences of failure are hardly hypothetical, they say.

According to an analysis by the impartial Brennan Center for Justice, at least 18 states have passed 30 laws making it difficult for Americans to vote by mid-July. On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a major new vote to revise the state’s elections, which critics say will make it one of the toughest places in America to vote, especially for people of color.

“Central to the work of racial justice is ensuring that blacks and browns, our most marginalized communities, our most marginalized residents of this country, have access to voting,” said Taifa Smith Butler, president of Demos, a Washington think tank , the racist equity. “We need courageous, courageous administration leaders to protect this democracy, because the fears we have today can only be allayed by the passage of these two voting laws.”