Intercept bureau chief: Manchin-backed bill doesn’t address voter suppression

Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s Washington bureau chief, said Tuesday that while Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) hopes to pass voting reform legislation with bipartisan support, his push to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act won’t address gerrymandering and a wave of restrictive voting bills recently passed in GOP-led states.

In an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Grim discussed Monday’s letter to congressional leadership from Manchin and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) seeking a bipartisan reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was gutted after a 2013 Supreme Court decision.

Grim said the John Lewis Voting Rights Act does not include concerns that Democrats hope to address through the more sweeping For the People Act, which Manchin has opposed in part due to his desire to pass bipartisan voting reforms.

“The John Lewis bill, what it does is it says the Voting Rights Act that [Supreme Court Chief Justice] John Roberts struck down will be put back into place, but it will take months to years to put it back in,” Grim said. “What that means is it does nothing about the gerrymandering efforts that will happen this cycle, and it does nothing about the voter suppression bills that have been passed in Georgia, Arizona, and the ones being contemplated across the country.”

Still, Grim said, Manchin has now signaled he has “bought into the idea of doing something around voting rights reform.”

Watch part of Grim’s interview above.