House Majority Whip James Clyburn said he does not think two key pieces of voting rights legislation the Senate will take up this week are dead — yet.
“They may be on life support,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But, you know, John Lewis, others, did not give up after the ’64 Civil Rights Act … So I’m going to tell everybody, we’re not giving up.”
When asked about moderate Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema saying a filibuster carve-out for voting rights could cause even harsher voter restrictions in the future by Republicans, Clyburn said he did not agree with her.
“No, she’s not right about that,” he said. “We just got around the filibuster to raise the debt limit. Why? Because we don’t put the full faith and credit of the United States at risk. No one has asked her to eliminate the filibuster. The filibuster is there for all of these issues that may be policy issues. But when it comes to the Constitution of the United States of America, no one person sitting down … ought to be able to pick up the telephone and say you are going to put a hold on my ability to vote. And that’s what’s going on here.
He added: “If we do not protect the vote with everything that we’ve got, we will not have a country to protect going forward.”
When asked about Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego possibly mounting a primary challenge to Sinema, Clyburn said he likes the congressman but “is going to stay out of that.”
“I’m gonna stay out of that. I know Ruben, I like Ruben and we work together very closely on these kinds of issues in the House,” he said. “He hadn’t said to me that he’s gonna run for the United States Senate.”
