WASHINGTON, Jan 13, 2022 (BSS/AFP) - Republican Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell lashed out at President Joe Biden on Wednesday, accusing him
of widening the US political divide with his push for voting rights reform
and call to change the Senate rules.

   "We have a sitting president -- a sitting president -- invoking the Civil
War, shouting about totalitarianism and labeling millions of Americans his
domestic enemies?" McConnell said in an unusually vitriolic speech on the
Senate floor. "Yesterday, he poured a giant can of gasoline on the fire."

   Biden, in a speech in Atlanta, Georgia, on Tuesday, called for a break in
the Senate's supermajority rule so Democrats can override Republican
opposition to voting rights reforms that he called crucial to saving US
democracy.

   Biden said Republicans are passing local laws "designed to suppress your
vote, to subvert our elections."

   "History has never been kind to those who sided with voter suppression
over voter rights," the Democratic president said. "I ask every elected
official in America: how do you want to be remembered?"

   Biden is to meet with Senate Democrats on Thursday to discuss voting
rights and changing the rules of the Senate to sidestep Republican
opposition.

   Biden will attend the Senate Democratic Caucus lunch to discuss the
"urgent need to pass legislation to protect the constitutional right to
vote," the White House said.

   In his speech, Biden challenged Democrats in the Senate to back two bills
already passed by the Democratic-majority House of Representatives that would
expand access to the polls and prevent practices that he said are being used
to suppress Black and other Democratic-leaning voters.

   The 50 Democrats in the 100-member Senate support the two bills, but under
the current supermajority requirement, 60 votes are needed to bring them to
the floor.

   If Republicans don't cooperate, then the supermajority requirement --
called the filibuster -- should be tossed to get the voting rights acts
through, Biden said.

   "We have no option but to change the Senate rules including getting rid of
the filibuster for this," he said. - 'Incoherent' -

   Biden's speech drew a furious response from McConnell, the conservative
senator from Kentucky who served as majority leader until Republicans lost
control of the Senate in the 2020 election.

   "The president's rant yesterday was incorrect, incoherent and beneath his
office," McConnell said, calling it "pure demagoguery."

   Biden delivered a "deliberately divisive speech that was designed to pull
our country further apart," he said.

   "To demonize Americans who disagree with him, he compared... a bipartisan
majority of senators to literal traitors," McConnell said. "How profoundly --
profoundly -- unpresidential."

   McConnell said he personally likes and respects Biden, who spent decades
in the Senate, but "I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday."

   Biden, asked about McConnell's remarks, said: "I like Mitch McConnell,
he's a friend."

   Shortly after, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki dismissed criticism of
Biden's Tuesday speech as "hilarious."

   "What is far more offensive is the effort to suppress people's basic right
to exercise... who they want to elect," she said.

   Former Democratic president Barack Obama also lent his support, writing in
USA Today that "now is the time for the US Senate to do the right thing."

   Democrats accuse Republican state legislatures of enacting laws aimed at
restricting the voting rights of minorities and curtailing early voting and
mail-in voting in an effort to suppress Democratic support.

   Republicans warn that a supposedly one-off maneuver could open the
floodgates to lifting the filibuster on all sorts of issues, thereby ending
any semblance of bipartisanship in the chamber.

   The move needs unanimous Democratic support to happen -- and that's far
from assured, with at least two of the more conservative Democratic senators,
Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, clearly
skeptical.

   Manchin and Sinema will be the two senators Biden will be seeking to
persuade at Thursday's Senate lunch.

   The "Freedom to Vote Act" is designed to make it easier for Americans to
cast their ballots by expanding mail-in voting and making Election Day an
official holiday.

   It also takes aim at voting restrictions imposed in several Republican-led
states following Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

   The other bill, named for civil rights icon John Lewis, would restore
anti-discrimination clauses of the Voting Rights Act removed by the Supreme
Court in 2013.

   Fifteen Black elected officials emotionally urged the Senate Wednesday to
pass the voting reform bills.

  "It's the most fundamental, sacred thing I can think of," Ohio
Representative Joyce Beatty, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, said.