When New York Democratic Rep. Mondaire Jones was at the White House for the signing of the proclamation making Juneteenth a national holiday last week, he told President Joe Biden their party needed him more involved in passing voting legislation on the Hill. In response? Biden “just sort of stared at me,” Jones said, describing an “awkward silence” that passed between the two. For Jones, the moment was emblematic of what he and a growing number of Democratic activists describe as a lackluster engagement from Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on an issue they consider urgent and necessary for the health of the democracy. Although the White House has characterized the issue as “the fight of his presidency,” Biden has prioritized his economic initiatives, measures more likely to win Republican support in the Senate. And he’s shown little interest thus far in diving into a messy debate over changing Senate rules to pass the legislation on Democratic votes alone. Read:Adams takes fragile lead in NYC Democratic mayoral primary But as Democrats’ massive election legislation was blocked by Republicans on Tuesday, progressives argued Biden could not avoid that fight much longer and must use all his leverage to find a path forward. The criticism suggested the voting debate may prove to be among Biden’s first major, public rifts with the left of his presidency. “President Obama, for his part, has been doing more to salvage our ailing democracy than the current president of the United States of America,” Mondaire said, referring to a recent interview in which the former president pushed for the legislation. The White House argues that both Biden and Harris have been in frequent touch with Democratic leadership and key advocacy groups as the legislation — dubbed the For the People Act — moved through Congress. Biden spoke out forcefully at times, declaring a new Georgia law backed by Republicans is an “atrocity” and using a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to say he was going to “fight like heck” for Democrats’ federal answer, but he left negotiations on the proposal to Hill leaders. On Monday, in advance of the vote, Biden met with Sen. Joe Manchin, D.W.Va., at the White House to discuss both voting rights and infrastructure. But Biden didn’t use his clout to work Republicans, who have expressed staunch and unified opposition to any voting legislation, arguing Democrats are pushing an unnecessary federal takeover of elections now run by state and county officials. Biden spent much of the month focused on foreign policy during a trip to Europe, encouraging Americans to get vaccinated and selling his infrastructure plan to the American public. He tasked Harris with taking the lead on the issue, and she spent last week largely engaged in private meetings with voting rights advocates as she traveled for a vaccination tour around the nation. Those efforts haven’t appeased some activists, who argue that state laws tightening election laws are designed to make it harder for Black, young and infrequent voters to cast ballots. The best way to counter the state laws is with federal legislation, they say, and Biden ought to come out for a change in the Senate filibuster rules that require 60 votes to advance most legislation. “Progressives are losing patience, and I think particularly African American Democrats are losing patience,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne, a longtime aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “They feel like they have done the kind of good Democrat thing over the last year-plus, going back to when Biden got the nomination, unifying support around Biden, turning out, showing up on Election Day.” “Progressives feel like, ’Hey, we did our part.′ And now when it’s time for the bill to be paid, so to speak, I think some progressives feel like, ’OK, well, how long do we have to wait?” Read:Voting ends, wait for results begins in NYC mayoral primary Still, there could be a silver lining for Democrats in the ongoing battle over voting rights: The issue is a major motivator for progressives and may serve to drive enthusiasm among Black voters as well, potentially driving engagement in a midterm year where Democrats are certain to face a tough political climate. Harris is expected to continue to meet with voting rights activists, business leaders and groups working on the issue in the states, and will speak out publicly on the issue aiming to raise awareness of new voting laws and to pressure Republicans to get on board with federal legislation. She watched the legislation fail to advance to debate on Tuesday, in her role as president of the Senate, and coming off the floor told reporters that she and Biden still support voting legislation and “the fight is not over.” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots group, said it’s been nowhere near the level of advocacy the public has seen on the infrastructure bill. “The president has been on the sidelines. He has issued statements of support, he’s maybe included a line or two in a speech here or there, but there has been nothing on the scale of his public advocacy for recovery for COVID relief, for roads and bridges,” Levin said. “We think this is a crisis at the same level as crumbling roads and bridges, and if we agree on that, the question is, why is the president on the sidelines?” White House aides push back against any suggestion the president and vice president haven’t been engaged on the issue, and say his laissez-faire approach to the negotiations is based partly on his experience as a senator and his belief that his involvement risks undermining a deal before it’s cut. But in private, White House advisers see infrastructure as the bigger political winner for Biden because it’s widely popular among voters of both parties, a White House official said. Passing a major infrastructure bill is seen within the White House as going further towards helping Democrats win in the 2022 midterms and beyond than taking on massive voting overhaul that had a slim chance of passage without a debate over filibuster rules, said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal talks. Embracing filibuster changes, in particular, risks undermining Biden’s profile as a bipartisan dealmaker and could poison the delicate negotiations around infrastructure, where the White House insists it still sees opportunity for bipartisan compromise. Read:US hits encouraging milestones on virus deaths and shots “He does have to preserve some negotiating power, and his brand probably does not compute with being at the tip of the spear on reforming the filibuster,” Payne acknowledged. Still, other Democrats say it’s time for Biden to get out front on the issue. Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, said the proposals Republicans are looking to pass in his home state are “more explicit and more dangerous than anything I’ve ever come across.” Allred said that the voting fight increases pressure on Biden to take the leadership on the filibuster fight. “We do need President Biden to make that a priority, because if you’re going to talk about supporting the underlying legislation, it really doesn’t matter if we don’t have way to get past the filibuster,” he said.

Until recently, the act of governing seemed to happen at the speed of presidential tweets. But now President Joe Biden is settling in for what appears will be a long, summer slog of legislating. Congress is hunkered down, the House and Senate grinding through a monthslong stretch, lawmakers trying to draft Biden’s big infrastructure ideas into bills that could actually be signed into law. Perhaps not since the drafting of the Affordable Care Act more than a decade ago has Washington tried a legislative lift as heavy. It’s going to take a while. Read: Biden promotes milestone of 300M vaccine shots in 150 days “Passing legislation is not a made-for-TV movie,” said Phil Schiliro, a former legislative affairs director at the Obama White House and veteran of congressional battles, including over the health care law. Biden appears comfortable in this space, embarked on an agenda in Congress that’s rooted in his top legislative priority — the $4 trillion “build back better” investments now being shaped as his American Jobs and American Families plans. To land the bills on his desk, the president is relying on an old-school legislative process that can feel out of step with today’s fast-moving political cycles and hopes for quick payoffs. Democrats are anxious it is taking too long and he is wasting precious time negotiating with Republicans, but Biden seems to like the laborious art of legislating. On Monday, Biden is expected to launch another week of engagement with members of both parties, and the White House is likely at some point to hear from a bipartisan group of senators working on a scaled-back $1 trillion plan as an alternative. At the same time, the administration is pushing ahead with the president’s own, more sweeping proposals being developed in the House and Senate budget committees, tallying as much as $6 trillion, under a process that could enable Democrats to pass it on their own. Initial votes are being eyed for late July. “This is how negotiations work,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said during last week’s twists and turns of the infrastructure negotiations. “We continue to work closely with Democrats of all views — as well as Republicans — on the path forward. There are many possible avenues to getting this done, and we are optimistic about our chances,” Bates said. During his administration, President Donald Trump had the full sweep of Republican control of the House and Senate for the first two years of his tenure, but the limits of legislating quickly became clear. Trump tended to govern by tweet, rather than the more traditional legislative process, bursting out with policy ideas and official administrative positions often at odds with his party in Congress. Read:Biden trip takeaways: Respect, optimism, some skepticism The Trump-era results were mixed, and Republicans were unable to clinch their top legislative priority, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. But they went on to secure a sizable achievement when Trump signed the GOP tax cuts into law at the end of 2017. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who is a leader of today’s bipartisan negotiations, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Trump, too, proposed an infrastructure package. If Biden sticks with the bipartisan talks he could not only fulfill a campaign promise but “keep his pledge of doing things across the aisle and getting something done,” Portman said. “Everybody wants to do infrastructure,” he said. Even as Biden reaches for a bipartisan deal, skeptical Democrats are wary of a repeat of 2009, when Barack Obama was president and they spent months negotiating the details of the Affordable Care Act with Republicans. Eventually Democrats passed the package that became known as “Obamacare” on their own. Lawmakers also have been energized by the speed at which Congress was able to approve COVID-19 relief — the massive CARES Act at the start of the pandemic in 2020 and more recently Biden’s American Rescue Plan in February. They are eager for swift action on these next proposals. Biden’s strategy this time is a two-part approach. He is trying to secure a bipartisan deal on roads, bridges and broadband — the more traditional types of infrastructure — while also pursuing the broader Democratic priorities package. The budget committees are preparing some $6 trillion in spending on what the White House calls the human infrastructure of Americans’ lives with child care centers, community colleges and elder care in Biden’s plans, adding in Democrats’ other long-running ideas. Among them, expanding Medicare for seniors with vision, hearing and dental services, and lowering the eligibility age to 60. Regardless of whether Biden succeeds or fails in the on-again-off-again talks with Republicans, Democrats will press on with their own massive package, the president at least having showed he tried. “There are two kinds of negotiation,” said Democrat Barney Frank, the former congressman and committee chairman from Massachusetts who was central to many Obama-era legislative battles. “One that will be successful and give you a good bill,” he said, and the other that will be unsuccessful, but will at least “take away any stigma of being partisan.” Read:Biden abroad: Pitching America to welcoming if wary allies Congress is eyeing an end-of-summer deadline to launch the budget reconciliation process, which would allow passage of the bills on majority votes, notably in the now split 50-50 Senate where 60 votes are typically required to advance legislation. After that, the House and Senate would prepare the actual packages for votes in fall. As the process drags on, it’s a reminder that it took more than a year in Congress to pass Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in spring 2010. “Tweets are so easy,” Schiliro said. “Legislating is different from that, so to develop good legislation takes time.”

In a rare show of bipartisan solidarity in the polarised US Capitol, the Senate came together on Tuesday to pass sweeping legislation designed to strengthen Washington’s hand in its escalating geopolitical and economic competition with China. By a vote of 68 to 32, the 2,400-page US Innovation and Competition Act of 2021 brought together a coalition of progressives, moderates and conservatives who, despite their intense disagreements on nearly every other consequential policy issue, have become united in their view the Chinese government under the rule of Xi Jinping has become a threat to global stability and American power. “The world is more competitive now than at any time since the end of the second world war,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said on the Senate floor moments before the vote. “If we do nothing, our days as the dominant superpower may be ending.” Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Read: Senators say US donating vaccines to Taiwan amid China row “This bill could be the turning point for American leadership in the 21st century, and for that reason, this legislation will go down as one of the most significant bipartisan achievements of the US Senate in recent history.” The bill, which includes about US$250 billion worth of spending, touches on nearly every aspect of the complex and increasingly tense relationship between Washington and Beijing. It includes billions of dollars to increase American semiconductor manufacturing, a sign of growing urgency in Washington that the US has become dangerously reliant on Chinese supply chains. It bans American officials from attending the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over human rights concerns, and declares Beijing’s policies in China’s far-west Xinjiang region a genocide, echoing the position of the US State Department and multiple parliaments around the world. Some US$2 billion of spending would be earmarked solely as incentives “to solely focus on legacy chip production to advance economic and national security interests, as these chips are essential to the auto industry, the military, and other critical industries”. It contains a range of provisions meant to strengthen US ties with Taiwan and US military alliances in the Pacific, including the Quad, an increasingly formalised pact between the US, Australia, India and Japan ” and still others to crack down on Chinese influence on US campuses, in international organisations and online. “This is an opportunity to compete with China at the research level,” Senator Roger Wicker, a Tennessee Republican, said before the vote. “This bill will strengthen our country’s innovation in key technology fields of the future, areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing and communications, and this bill also is a game changer in terms of giving universities all over the United States an opportunity to participate in game-changing research.” The legislation also authorises new sanctions on Chinese officials for a range of crimes, including cyberattacks, intellectual property theft and, in Xinjiang ” where human rights groups cite United Nations reports and witness accounts that as many as 1 million Uygurs and other Muslim minorities are held in “re-education camps” ” against perpetrators of “systematic rape, coercive abortion, forced sterilisation or involuntary contraceptive implantation policies and practices”. Beijing has repeatedly denied the allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang and insists that the camps are vocational training facilities. Read: Slow to start, China mobilizes to vaccinate at headlong pace Now the issue shifts to the House of Representatives, which has already begun considering a number of China-related bills, the largest being the Eagle Act. Eventually, if the House passes its own legislation, the two chambers will have to reconcile any differences in their respective bills before they can send them to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. Biden has used the US competition with China as justification for a range of domestic and foreign policies, and is almost certain to sign a final bill once it reaches his desk. For various reasons, including stated concerns about rising US debt and individual amendments not being added to the bill, a handful of the Senate’s frequent critics of Beijing voted against the legislation. They included Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida, who said the cost of the legislation was too high despite “the threat (the Chinese government) poses to our national security”. The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “I think the bill is important, whether or not we’re talking about the competition with China,” said Elizabeth Economy, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “It’s clear that the United States needs to do more, and I think this is a really important effort and it sends an important message as well.” “I think there is widespread acknowledgement among both Democrats and Republicans that we need to be smarter and do better in terms of meeting the broad array of challenges that China presents to our political, economic and security interests,” she said. “There’s a sense that China poses a clear and present danger, if not an existential threat, and that if the US fails to step up and meet this challenge at this particular moment in time, it may not have another opportunity.” The Senate vote followed months of debate in the chamber. In February, Schumer asked numerous Senate committees to draft China legislation of their own, which he ultimately combined into the expansive bill that passed on Tuesday. Asked in a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday whether he would support the funding requests in the bill, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he would “welcome” the opportunity. Read:US to swiftly boost global vaccine sharing, Biden announces “I have to tell you again that we really applaud this initiative,” Blinken said. “It’s going to give us new tools, new resources to deal more effectively with the competition, and I very much welcome the opportunity to work closely with you, members of this committee, other relevant committees to put this into practice,” he said. Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee have already agreed to some changes to the Eagle Act, including adding clearer language calling for a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Politico reported, citing people involved in the discussions. Republicans say they want more concessions to support a final version, including stronger language in support of democracy in Taiwan, according to the Politico report.