Republican Governor Brian Kemp signs the law S.B. 202, a restrictive voting law that activists have said aimed to curtail the influence of Black voters who were instrumental in state elections that helped Democrats win the White House and narrow control of the U.S. Senate, in this handout photo posted to Kemp’s Twitter feed on March 25, 2021.
Governor Brian Kemp’s Twitter feed | Handout via Reuters
President Joe Biden on Friday condemned a sweeping GOP-backed election regulation bill signed into law Thursday evening in Georgia that would add new identification requirements to absentee voting, limit ballot drop boxes and prohibit offering food or water to voters in line, among other provisions.
“This is Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” Biden said in a statement, comparing the legislation to the notorious voting restrictions that kept people of color from casting ballots in the South before the civil rights movement. “It must end. We have a moral and Constitutional obligation to act.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the 96-page bill into law Thursday evening just hours after Republican state legislators passed the overhaul of election rules known as S.B. 202.
Democratic state Rep. Park Cannon was arrested by Georgia state troopers on Thursday after she knocked on Kemp’s office door as he signed S.B. 202 into law.
The new election rules in Georgia come as Senate Democrats aim to pass a sweeping election reform bill, the For the People Act, amid a wave of Republican-backed voter restrictions proposed in state legislatures across the country.
The debate over election integrity came to a head this year when conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud led violent pro-Trump rioters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Prominent Democratic lawyer Marc Elias announced a lawsuit Thursday evening filed on behalf of civil rights groups New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter Fund and Rise. The complaint alleges that provisions of the new law violate the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Advocacy groups including New Georgia Project and Black Voters Matter Fund have called on Biden to push Congress to pass federal voting rights legislation like the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. They’d like to see him use his political clout to push for measures that would help Democrats on the Hill pass voting rights bills, like abolishing the Senate filibuster.
Biden in his first press conference on Friday signaled he may support scrapping, rather than reforming, the Senate filibuster if his priorities get held up in Congress.
“If we have to, if there’s complete lockdown and chaos as a consequence of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about,” he told reporters.
Biden has said he backs going back to a so-called talking filibuster, where lawmakers have to actively hold the Senate floor to block legislation. As of now, the Senate needs 60 votes to move ahead with a bill — which means Republicans can block the vast majority of bills in a chamber divided 50-50 by party.
—CNBC’s Jacob Pramuk contributed to this report.
