| American presidents like to talk about rights. Official Washington often obsesses about rules. On Tuesday, President Biden tackled both during an expansive speech about voting rights and alleged voter suppression delivered against the Atlanta backdrop of the civil rights movement and what progressives describe as a 2022 campaign to thwart racism and save democracy. After months of hedging about whether he favored jettisoning the 60-vote filibuster rule he had long defended as a senator, Biden said two bills dealing with voting rights and elections are so important to enact through the 50-50 Senate that he wants an exception to the filibuster requirement. The Hill: Biden calls for changing Senate rules to allow voting bills to pass. Neither the proposed filibuster exception nor the bills themselves are expected to garner sufficient support, but in a midterm year that looks increasingly grim for many Democratic candidates, the president laid down rhetorical markers. His muscular rhetoric pulls back the curtain on race-tinged and bitter partisanship during this election year and is a tacit admission that Biden’s focus on wooing his Democratic colleagues to enact the stalled $2 trillion Build Back Better agenda is on a back burner. The president, who was a Delaware senator for 36 years, said Tuesday that he had become a converted realist since Jan. 6, 2021, about scorched-earth political motives and the vulnerability of what he called “democracy’s threshold liberty,” which he described as the right “to vote and have that vote count.” Biden said former President Trump and his allies are angling for ways to “disenfranchise anyone who votes against them, simple as that. …We must be vigilant.” “Sadly, the United States Senate, designed to be the world’s greatest deliberative body, has been rendered a shell of its former self,” he said. “As an institutionalist, I believe that the threat to our democracy is so grave that we must find a way to pass these voting rights bills, debate them, vote. Let the majority prevail. And if that bare minimum is blocked, we have no option but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster for this” (The Washington Post). The president’s pitch, aimed both at voters and senators, is opposed by Republicans in the upper chamber, as well as at least two Democratic senators. Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) say they want to keep the filibuster. “We need some good rules changes to make the place work better. But getting rid of the filibuster doesn’t make it work better,” Manchin repeated (The Hill). Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), more eager to draw contrasts with Republicans than underscore intra-party divisions, nevertheless said a vote could happen as early as Wednesday. He previously said a vote would take place by Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “Our experts have told us moving by mid-January is the latest we can go,” he added. Democrats, according to Schumer, are privately telling Manchin and Sinema that because of restrictive laws adopted by states, including Arizona and Georgia, colleagues will lose in November without new federal voting rights protections. They question why voters will turn out for Democratic candidates if the president and his allies in Congress don’t take a stand now, reports The Hill’s Jordain Carney. The Hill: Biden wants midterm contests to draw contrasts with Republicans rather than be a referendum on his presidency. Georgia Democratic gubernatorial challenger Stacey Abrams did not attend Biden’s Atlanta speech, citing a scheduling conflict. Progressive activists in Georgia boycotted the president’s remarks, assailing his events as rhetoric more than action, even as Abrams has defended Biden on voting rights (NewsOne and The Associated Press). Offering no explanation for any scheduling issues as news media highlighted an absence interpreted as a snub, the president told reporters he spoke early in the day with Abrams by phone. “We have a great relationship,” he said. “We’re all on the same page.” The Hill: Abrams thanks Biden for Georgia speech, backs call for Senate rules change. Trump, who has been blamed by some Republicans for the GOP’s loss of two Senate seats in Georgia a year ago, tried on Tuesday to drive a wedge between Biden and Abrams among her supporters. “He’s been so terrible she now wants nothing to do with him,” he wrote in a statement. “Even the woke, radical left realizes that Joe Biden’s Administration is an embarrassment.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) scolded Biden from the Senate floor on Tuesday, likening the president’s approach to his predecessor’s tactics. ”President Biden goes down the same tragic road taken by President Trump, casting doubt on the reliability of American elections. This is a sad, sad day. I expected more of President Biden, who came into office with the stated goal of bringing the country together,” he added (NBC News). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who worked to eliminate the filibuster for votes on Supreme Court nominees, warned that Democrats fail to imagine the damage a “post-nuclear Senate” creates. “If the Democratic leader tries to shut millions of Americans and entire states out of the business of governing, the operations of this body will change,” he said. “But not in a way that rewards the rule breakers. Not in ways that advantage this president, this majority or their party” (The Hill). Vice President Harris, speaking in Atlanta on Tuesday ahead of the president, said, “Across our nation, anti-voter laws could make it more difficult for as many as 55 million Americans to vote. That’s 1 out of 6 people in our country.” 
© Associated Press/Patrick Semansky More in Congress: Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday that the U.S. economy no longer needs the central bank’s extraordinary infusion of post-pandemic stimulus and will begin to taper its accommodative monetary policy later this year. The Fed is widely expected to launch a series of interest rate hikes, perhaps beginning this spring and continuing through 2022. “It is really time for us to move away from those emergency pandemic settings to a more normal level,” he told the Senate Banking Committee during a confirmation hearing ahead of anticipated Senate support for his nomination to a second term (The Wall Street Journal). “As we move through this year … if things develop as expected … we’re going to end our asset purchases in March, meaning we’ll be raising rates over the course of the year,” he told committee members. “At some point perhaps later this year we will start to allow the balance sheet to run off, and that’s just the road to normalizing policy” (CNBC). Powell defended the Fed’s initial, now-altered analysis that inflationary pressures would be short-lived in an expanding economy recovering from COVID-19 shutdowns and supply chain problems. The central bank, he said, had not anticipated the labor supply challenges resulting from unprecedented employee shifts in which workers resigned, moved out of the workforce or demanded higher wages and more flexible schedules. And supply chain constraints on demand have not ebbed, he added. Higher interest rates put a brake on inflation by slowing down the flow of money, which has been cheap and plentiful as the Fed and Congress together injected more than $10 trillion worth of stimulus beginning in 2020. “If we see inflation persisting at high levels longer than expected, then if we have to raise interest more over time, we will,” Powell said. “We will use our tools to get inflation back.” The consumer price index in December, which will be reported this morning, will likely show inflation up more than 7 percent year over year, a hike in prices not seen since the 1980s. Many Americans complain their incomes are not keeping pace with soaring food and gasoline prices and rising costs for goods and services. Reuters: U.S. economy can withstand Fed tightening, omicron surge, Powell says. The chairman — who fielded questions on many topics, including how climate change fits into the central bank’s twin mandates of low inflation and full employment — told senators the pandemic and its effects are far from over. Reuters: U.S. stocks bounce, investors digest the news of rate hikes ahead. The committee on Thursday will hold a confirmation hearing for longtime Washington policymaker Lael Brainard, Biden’s nominee to be Fed vice chair. Her testimony is expected to appeal to progressives in her perspectives on climate change and her caution about risky behavior by financial institutions (CNBC). 
© Graeme Jennings/Pool via Associated Press | 
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