Martin Luther King Jr.'s offspring led a march in Washington on Monday to push US President Joe Biden and Democrats in the US Senate to pass a law protecting the voting rights of all Americans.
In honoring the civil rights leader's life and legacy, the King Family and more than 100 national and local civil rights groups marched across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge into downtown Washington as part of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day D.C. Peace Walk, as per Reuters.
The activity comes after President Biden's failed campaign to urge colleagues in the US Senate to modify the chamber's rules last week. It would supposedly allow Democrats to overpower Republican opposition to the bill. However, two conservative Democrat senators rejected the notion.
An Uphill Battle For Voting Rights
Before the start of the march, King's son, Martin Luther King III, acknowledged Democrat lawmakers' efforts to pass a comprehensive infrastructure bill in 2021. However, he appealed to pass the voting-rights legislation using "the same energy to ensure all Americans have the unencumbered right to vote."
If the bill gets passed into law, Americans would have expanded access to mail-in voting, stronger federal supervision of elections in states with a record of racial discrimination, and stricter rules on campaign finance.
Democrats argue that the bill is needed to fight off new voting restrictions passed in Republican-led states that would make the casting of ballots more challenging for minority and low-income voters.
New restrictions on suffrage have been enacted after former President Donald Trump issued false claims that his 2020 election loss was due to massive fraud.
Republican Senators, who control half of the 100 seats, are united in their opposition to the legislation, which they see as a partisan power grab. That left Biden and Schumer with only one option for getting it passed: persuading conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to agree to change the chamber's "filibuster" rule, which requires 60 senators to agree on most bills.
Crucial Moment in US Civil Rights History
Senior Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer announced that the chamber would tackle the legislation and hold a procedural vote on Tuesday, the federal holiday commemorating King, the civil rights activist who advocated for nuclear weapons ban, the end of the Vietnam War, the creation of labor unions and access to healthcare to help improve the living conditions of many people.
On Friday, Biden told reporters that he is unsure if his Democratic Party can pass the landmark voting rights reform bill. But he assured the public that he would continue fighting for its passage, as per Al Jazeera.
"As long as I'm in the White House, as long as I'm engaged at all, I'm going to be fighting," Biden said.
For the late civil rights leader's son, "the stakes could not be higher" for Biden and his lawmaker allies to protect and expand his father's legacy.
"Senators now face one of the most existential choices of their tenure: protect our voting rights or go down in history as an enabler of voter suppression," King noted in a statement, as per CNN report.
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