28 2GM Wednesday January 19 2022 | the times
Wo r l d
President Biden was facing another
humiliating defeat in Congress last
night as his push to enact landmark
voting rights reform teetered on the
brink of collapse in the face of united
Republican opposition and feuding
among the Democrats.
The White House was still short of
the votes needed to force through the
Voting Rights Act, which it claims is
vital to saving American democracy
from Republican efforts to restrict
voting rights and even overturn the
results of future elections.
The showdown on the Senate floor
appeared doomed to fail, however, as
dissenting Democrats refused to back a
rule change that would allow Biden to
pass the act without Republican
support. After the collapse of his flag-
ship Build Back Better spending plan
last month, the president is heading for
another crushing defeat at the hands of
his own party, threatening disaster for
the Democrats at the mid-term elec-
tions in November.
The Democrats had promised to
force a Senate vote on Monday, Martin
Luther King Day, but pushed it back
when defeat seemed inevitable. With
the Senate tied 50-50 and Republicans
united against the Voting Rights Act,
the Democrats have sought to override
the arcane filibuster rule that requires
60 votes for most legislation to pass.
That effort, however, has been blocked
by the Democratic senators Joe
Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten
Sinema of Arizona. The same two
torpedoed the Build Back Better plan
last month.
Biden will make a last-ditch appeal to
salvage the Voting Rights Act at a press
conference today, with frantic efforts
continuing behind the scenes to force
Manchin and Sinema into line.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic
majority leader, opened the Senate
debate yesterday by warning the two
rebels that “the eyes of the
nation will be watching”.
He added: “The Amer-
ican people deserve to
see their senators go on
record on whether they
will support these bills or
President Biden’s
approval ratings
have slumped to
33 per centoppose them. The public is entitled to
know where each senator stands on an
issue as sacrosanct as defending our
democracy.”
Manchin and Sinema appear impla-
cable, however.
Martin Luther King III, son of the
late civil rights leader, compared them
to moderate white politicians his father
encountered during the civil rights
battles of the 1950s and 1960s, who
claimed to support voting rights for
black Americans but would not vote for
them. “History will not remember
them kindly,” King said.
The campaign was prompted by
Republican efforts to restrict voting in
several US states after Donald Trump’s
claims that the 2020 election was
“stolen”. In 19 Republican-controlled
states, dozens of laws were passed that
restrict access to the ballot and give
state legislatures greater oversight in
certifying election results. The changes
will mostly affect black voters.
The Democrats argue that the new
laws lay the groundwork for disputing
and even overturning election results.
Pro-Trump Republicans are running to
become chief election officers in
several states. Trump himself, still
toying with a campaign to retake the
White House in 2024, said recently that
“sometimes the vote-counter is more
important than the candidate”.
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Mary-
land said: “What we see happening in
state legislatures are not just efforts to
put up barriers to the ballot box, they’re
also passing laws to authorise partisan
operatives to interfere in the counting
of the votes, and even to overturn the
result.”
He said that using the filibuster to
block legislation was unconstitutional
and “empowers individual senators by
disempowering the overwhelming
majority of the American people”.
Biden changed his focus to voting
rights after the collapse of his Build
Back Better agenda before Christmas.
The Democrats had hoped to use the
anniversary of the January 6 riot last
year — when Trump supporters
stormed the Capitol in an attempt to
halt certification of Biden’s victory — as
a springboard to pass the two bills.
“The attack on our democracy is
real,” Biden said in a speech marking
Martin Luther King Day. “It’s no longer
just about who gets to vote. It’s about
who gets to count the vote, and whether
your vote counts at all.”
Without the support of Manchin and
Sinema, the campaign on voting rights
has appeared doomed from the outset.
Yet Biden and party leaders have felt
compelled to try, despite the risk of
further defeat and humiliation. Failure
to push through legislation deemed
crucial for the survival of democracy
would be an admission that Biden’s
presidency has entered its lame-duck
phase after only a year in office.The Nobel prize-winning author
Gabriel García Márquez once said that
we all have three lives: the public, the
private and the secret.
Nearly eight years after his death, the
Colombian author’s own secret has
emerged: a daughter with a Mexican
woman 33 years his junior.
In the 1990s García Márquez had an
affair with the writer Susana Cato, with
whom he worked on two film scripts.
Their daughter was named Indira,
after the former Indian prime minister,
Indira Gandhi, whom García Márquez
admired and who was said to have been
the first person to congratulate himHumiliating defeat
looms for Biden on
voting rights laws
United States
Hugh Tomlinson Washington
What is in the Voting Rights Act?
Two bills — Freedom to Vote and
John Lewis Voting Rights — were
drafted by the Democrats after the
2020 presidential election to
challenge new restrictions relating
to early voting and race issues in
Republican-held states.Why do they matter?
Since Donald Trump left office, still
claiming the election was stolen,
19 Republican-held states have
passed at least 33 laws that critics
claim make it harder to vote and
could be used to dispute results.
The charges would overwhelmingly
affect people of colour, most of
whom are Democrats.Where do the Republicans stand?
They are united against the bills,
which cleared the Democrat-held
House of Representatives last week,
teeing up a showdown in the
Senate, which is split 50-50. The
voting package would need 60
votes to pass, requiring ten
Republicans to switch sides.
That will not happen. The
Republican Senate leader Mitch
McConnell has denounced the bills
as a “naked power grab” and has
kept his party in lock-step against
the plans.What about the Democrats?
They had to be seen to act. The vast
majority of them support the bills
but President Biden is hamstrung by
the deadlock in the Senate. With no
hope of persuading the Republicans
to back the bills, the White House
has sought to override the filibuster,
allowing the act to pass without any
Republican votes, providing all 50
Democratic senators are on board.
Conservative Democrats have
balked at that, however. The dissent
has been led by Joe Manchin of
West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of
Arizona — both Democratic senators
in Republican-leaning states — who
also torpedoed Biden’s flagship
Build Back Better Act last month.
Despite relentless pressure
Manchin and Sinema
show no signs of backing
down. Unless they can
be won over, Biden’s
push on voting reform
looks doomed.T
he devastation
left by a volcanic
eruption near
Tonga has been
revealed in
satellite images. At least
three people are known to
have died (James Salmon
writes).
The pictures showScale of tsunami
devastation in
Tonga revealed
Tale of the secret daughter
Mexico
Stephen Gibbs
Latin America Correspondentwhen he was awarded the Nobel prize
for literature in 1982.
At the time of Indira’s birth, García
Márquez was married, apparently hap-
pily, to Mercedes Barcha. The couple,
who lived in Mexico City, had two sons,
Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
It is not known whether Barcha, who
died in 2020, knew of her husband’s
daughter. The Colombian journalist
who uncovered the story, Gustavo Ta-
tis, said it was possible she had had “an
intuition” about the affair and the child.
Susana Cato was born in 1960 in
Mexico City. She wrote the screenplays
for You Don’t Play with Love in 1991 with
García Márquez, as well as the short
film The Mirror of Two Moons.
Indira Cato, now in her early thirties,
has always used her mother’s surname.hQ&A
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