WASHINGTON — Republicans on Tuesday blocked the most ambitious voting rights legislation to come before Congress in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ attempts to counter a wave of state-level ballot restrictions and supercharging a campaign to end the legislative filibuster.
President Biden and Democratic leaders said the defeat was only the beginning of their drive to steer federal voting rights legislation into law, and vowed to redouble their efforts in the weeks ahead.
“In the fight for voting rights, this vote was the starting gun, not the finish line,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader. “We will not let it go. We will not let it die. This voter suppression cannot stand.”
But the Republican blockade in the Senate left Democrats without a clear path forward, and without a means to beat back the restrictive voting laws racing through Republican-led states. For now, it will largely be left to the Justice Department to decide whether to challenge any of the state laws in court — a time-consuming process with limited chances of success — and to a coalition of outside groups to help voters navigate the shifting rules.
Democrats’ best remaining hope to enact legal changes rests on a long-shot bid to eliminate the legislative filibuster, which Republicans used on Tuesday to block the measure, called the For the People Act. Seething progressive activists pointed to the Republicans’ refusal to even allow debate on the issue as a glaring example of why Democrats in the Senate must move to eliminate the rule and bypass the G.O.P. on a range of liberal priorities while they still control Congress and the presidency.
They argued that with former President Donald J. Trump continuing to press the false claim that the election was stolen from him — a narrative that many Republicans have perpetuated as they have pushed for new voting restrictions — Democrats in Congress could not afford to allow the voting bill to languish.
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“The people did not give Democrats the House, Senate and White House to compromise with insurrectionists,” Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote on Twitter. “Abolish the filibuster so we can do the people’s work.”
Liberal activists promised a well-funded summertime blitz, replete with home-state rallies and million-dollar ad campaigns, to try to ramp up pressure on a handful of Senate Democrats opposed to changing the rules. Mounting frustration with Republicans could accelerate a growing rift between liberals and more moderate lawmakers over whether to try to pass a bipartisan infrastructure and jobs package or move unilaterally on a far more ambitious plan.
But key Democratic moderates who have defended the filibuster rule — led by Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — appeared unmoved and said their leaders should try to find narrower compromises, including on voting and infrastructure bills.
Ms. Sinema dug in against eliminating the filibuster on the eve of the vote, writing an op-ed in The Washington Post defending the 60-vote threshold. Without the rule there to force broad consensus, she argued, Congress could swing wildly every two years between enacting and then reversing liberal and conservative agenda items.
“The filibuster is needed to protect democracy, I can tell you that,” Mr. Manchin told reporters on Tuesday.
In their defeat, top Democrats appeared keen to at least claim Republicans’ unwillingness to take up the bill as a political issue. They planned to use it in the weeks and months ahead to stoke enthusiasm with their progressive base by highlighting congressional Republicans’ refusal to act to preserve voting rights at a time when their colleagues around the country are racing to clamp down on ballot access.
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“Once again, Senate Republicans have signed their names in the ledger of history alongside Donald Trump, the big lie and voter suppression — to their enduring disgrace,” Mr. Schumer said. “This vote, I’m ashamed to say, is further evidence that voter suppression has become part of the official platform of the Republican Party.”
Democrats’ bill, which passed the House in March, would have ushered in the largest federally mandated expansion of voting rights since the 1960s, ended the practice of partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, forced super PACs to disclose their big donors and created a new public campaign financing system.
It would have pushed back against more than a dozen Republican-led states that have enacted laws that experts say will make it harder for people of color and young people to vote, or shift power over elections to G.O.P. legislators. Other states appear poised to follow suit, including Texas, whose Republican governor on Tuesday called a special legislative session in July, when lawmakers are expected to complete work on a voting bill Democrats temporarily blocked last month.
After months of partisan wrangling over the role of the federal government in elections, the outcome on Tuesday was hardly a surprise to either party. All 50 Senate Democrats voted to advance the federal legislation and open debate on other competing voting bills. All 50 Republicans united to deny it the 60 votes needed to overcome the filibuster, deriding it as a bloated federal overreach.
Republicans never seriously considered the legislation, or a narrower alternative proposed in recent days by Mr. Manchin. They mounted an aggressive campaign in congressional committees, on television and finally on the floor to portray the bill as a self-serving federalization of elections to benefit Democrats. They called Democrats’ warnings about democracy hyperbolic. And they defended their state counterparts, including arguments that the laws were needed to address nonexistent “election integrity” issues Mr. Trump raised about the 2020 election.
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Senate Republicans particularly savaged provisions restructuring the Federal Election Commission to avoid deadlocks and the proposed creation of a public campaign financing system for congressional campaigns.
“These same rotten proposals have sometimes been called a massive overhaul for a broken democracy, sometimes just a modest package of tweaks for a democracy that’s working perfectly and sometimes a response to state actions, which this bill actually predates by many years,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader. “But whatever label Democrats slap on the bill, the substance remains the same.”
His top deputy, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, also threw cold water on any suggestion the two parties could come together on a narrower voting bill as long as Democrats wanted Congress to overpower the states.
“I don’t think there’s anything I’ve seen yet that doesn’t fundamentally change the way states conduct elections,” he said. “It’s sort of a line in the sand for most of our members.”
At more than 800 pages, the For the People Act was remarkably broad. It was first assembled in 2019 as a compendium of long-sought liberal election changes and campaign pledges that had energized Democrats’ anti-corruption campaign platform in the 2018 midterm elections. At the time, Democrats did not control the Senate or the White House, and so the bill served more as a statement of values than a viable piece of legislation.
