President Joe Biden took a dig Tuesday at two Senate members that he said “vote more with” his “Republican friends” during remarks commemorating the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
During one portion of the speech, Biden highlighted the “right to vote.” He referred to efforts “to replace nonpartisan election administrators and to intimidate those charged with tallying and reporting the election results” as a “truly unprecedented assault on our democracy.”
The president continued on to urge Congress to act on voting rights and responded to apparent questions from “all the folks on TV” about why he hasn’t gotten “this done.” Biden in part seemed to blame two members of his own party, presumably Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, for supporting the filibuster – though he did not call them out by name.
“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘why doesn’t Biden get this done?'” the president exclaimed. “Well, because Biden only has the majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But we’re not giving up.”
WATCH:
Manchin and Sinema largely vote with Democrats on various issues but have been against efforts to eliminate the filibuster rule. A spokesperson for Sinema said in January that she “is not open to changing her mind about eliminating the filibuster.”
“The filibuster is a critical tool to protecting [minority] input and our democratic form of government,” Manchin wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published in April.
Biden continued on to say that he plans “to fight like heck with every tool in” his “disposal for” the Senate passage of the For the People Act, which was passed by the House earlier in 2021. (RELATED: The House Passed H.R. 1 – Here’s What’s In It)
Barely-veiled criticism of Manchin and Sinema https://t.co/c4A8ag6LYD
— Joseph Zeballos-Roig (@josephzeballos) June 1, 2021