The family of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used the national holiday that honors the renowned civil rights activist to call on lawmakers to pass new federal laws that would make it easier for people across the country to vote.

Martin Luther King III, speaking at the Deliver For Voting Rights Day of Action in Washington, D.C., said that "history will be watching" tomorrow when Senators vote on voting rights legislation.

"Black and brown Americans will be watching what happens tomorrow. In 50 years, students will read about what happens tomorrow and know whether our leaders had the integrity to do the right thing," he said, according to CNN.

Yolanda Renee King, the 13-year-old granddaughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., encouraged lawmakers not just to remember her grandfather's legacy but to act on it.

"For all the elected leaders out there that are tweeting, posting, and celebrating my grandfather, Dr. King, today, my message to you is simple: Do not celebrate. Legislate," she said at a press conference Monday.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s activism was instrumental in getting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed. That law prohibited racial discrimination in voting laws.

However, recent Supreme Court decisions have weakened some of the protections provided by that law. In addition, Republicans in several states have passed laws that make it more difficult to cast a vote — and analysts say those state laws will have a greater impact on communities of color.

The Senate is currently weighing a bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Accountability Act, that aims to eliminate racial discrimination in Congressional redistricting. The bill faces a Republican filibuster, but the White House has called on the Democrat-controlled Senate to change the rules to allow the bill to pass.

On Monday, Yolanda directly called out two moderate Democrats — Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — both of whom have signaled their hesitation to change Senate rules.

"The Senate must do the right thing when this legislation comes to a vote tomorrow. Senator Sinema, Senator Manchin, our future hinges on your decision and history will remember what choice you make," she said.

Yolanda's comments on Monday echoed those of Vice President Kamala Harris, who also used Martin Luther King Jr. Day to advocate for passing voting rights legislation.

In Atlanta, King's old congregation, the Ebeneezer Baptist Church, honored King with a program filled with speeches from local politicians and musical performances.

Days before the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the Senate will vote on filibuster rules changes to advance stalled voting legislation that Democrats say is needed to protect democracy.

In a letter Monday to colleagues, Schumer, D-N.Y., said the Senate “must evolve” and will “debate and consider” the rules changes by Jan. 17, on or before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as the Democrats seek to overcome Republican opposition to their elections law package.

“Let me be clear: January 6th was a symptom of a broader illness — an effort to delegitimize our election process," Schumer wrote, “and the Senate must advance systemic democracy reforms to repair our republic or else the events of that day will not be an aberration — they will be the new norm.”

The election and voting rights package has been stalled in the evenly-split 50-50 Senate, blocked by a Republican-led filibuster and leaving Democrats unable to mount the 60-vote threshold needed to advance it toward passage.

Democrats have been unable to agree among themselves over potential changes to the Senate rules to reduce the 60-vote hurdle, despite months of private negotiations.

Two holdout Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have tried to warn their party off changes to the Senate rules, arguing that if and when Republicans take majority control of the chamber, they could use the lower voting threshold to advance bills Democrats oppose.

President Joe Biden has waded cautiously into the debate — a former senator who largely stands by existing rules but is also under enormous political pressure to break the logjam on the voting legislation.

How the Senate rules would be changed remains under discussion.

Voting rights advocates warn that Republican-led states are passing election legislation and trying to install elections officials loyal to the former president, Donald Trump, in ways that could subvert future elections.

Trump urged his followers last Jan. 6 to “fight like hell” for his presidency, and a mob stormed the Capitol trying to stop Congress from certifying the state election tallies for Biden. It was the worst domestic attack on the seat of government in U.S. history.

A Democratic congressman was arrested Thursday while participating in a voting rights demonstration near the U.S. Capitol.

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Georgia, said he and a handful of other protesters were arrested while calling on the Senate to pass voting rights legislation and filibuster reform.

Video shared by Johnson on Twitter shows the Congressman chanting "whose streets? Our streets. Whose house? Our house," with his hand zip-tied behind his back.

"I was arrested today protesting against Senate inaction on voting rights legislation & filibuster reform. In the spirit of my dear friend and mentor – the late Congressman John Lewis – I was getting in #goodtrouble," Johnson tweeted.

In a statement to USA Today, the Capitol Police said that Johnson and nine others were arrested for "unlawfully demonstrating" and charged with "crowding, obstructing or causing an inconvenience."

Johnson is the second elected representative to be arrested near the Capitol this month. Capitol Police arrested Rep. Joyce Beatty on July 15 as she participated in a voting rights protest.

House Democrats have been urging the Senate to pass the For the People Act, legislation that would expand voting rights, ban partisan gerrymandering and change campaign finance laws. Though the bill passed the House earlier this year, it has stalled in the Senate and faces an uphill battle for passage given Republican opposition.

Meanwhile, the Brennan Center for Justice reports that 18 states have enacted 30 laws that restrict voting access — many of them proposed by Republican lawmakers under the false guise that widespread voter fraud took place in the 2020 election.

WASHINGTON —

As congressional Democrats gear up for another bruising legislative push to expand voting rights, much of their attention has quietly focused on a small yet crucial voting bloc with the power to scuttle their plans: the nine Supreme Court justices.

Democrats face dim prospects for passing voting legislation through a narrowly divided Congress, where an issue that once drew compromise has become an increasingly partisan flashpoint. But as they look to reinstate key parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights-era law diminished over the past decade by Supreme Court rulings, they have accepted the reality that any bill they pass probably will wind up in litigation — and ultimately back before the high court.

The task of building a more durable Voting Rights Act got harder when the high court's conservative majority on July 1 issued its second major ruling in eight years narrowing the law's once robust power.

“What it feels like is a shifting of the goal posts,” said Damon Hewitt, the president and executive director of the left-leaning Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Sparring in Congress for months has focused on a different Democratic bill overhauling elections, known as the For the People Act, which Republican senators blocked from debate on the chamber's floor last month.

Separately, however, Democrats have held a marathon series of low-key “field hearings” to prepare for votes on a second measure, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which could come to the House floor for a vote in September. The bill would allow courts and the Department of Justice to once again police changes to voting rules in places with a history of electoral discrimination against minorities, a practice the Supreme Court put on hold in 2013.

Democrats hope the hearings they have conducted with little fanfare will help build a legislative record that could withstand a court challenge. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Friday that the process will document what he called "the disgraceful tactics that Republican-led state legislatures are using across the country to keep people from voting.”

That's criticism that Republicans reject, arguing that the courts and Democratic administrations have selectively enforced the law in the past.

“It’s not a coincidence that a decade of court cases were only focused on Republican states,” said Rep. Rodney Davis, an Illinois Republican who sits on a committee that conducted the field hearings.

Pressure has built for months on congressional Democrats to counteract a concerted state-level Republican push to enact new voting restrictions, inspired by President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election. But there is a new sense of urgency among many in the party’s activist base following the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which upheld two restrictive Arizona laws and will limit the ability to challenge voting restrictions in court.

“We cannot wait until October or November," said Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus.

While the specifics of the legislation have not yet been released, it would develop a new formula for determining which states and local governments would be subject to a review process known as “preclearance.” The court blocked the practice in 2013, reasoning that the formula used to determine which places are subjected to it was outdated and unfairly punitive. But the court also ruled that Congress could develop a new formula.

Though laws and rules already in place wouldn't be subject to a retooled Voting Rights Act, future ones would.

“We want to get our work done, but it has to be data-focused and defensible within the courts,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, a California Democrat who serves on a committee that has held many of the hearings.

Yet serious questions remain about whether the Supreme Court, which has a new and expanded conservative majority, would still be receptive to a new preclearance formula.

There's also been a major shift in the Republican Party.

The Voting Rights Act enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress for decades. It was reauthorized five times with commanding majorities, the most recent in 2006. But the bipartisan support eroded dramatically after the court's first ruling, in 2013, in the case of Shelby County, Alabama, v. Holder.

“If you look at the sea change in the politics, it all stems from Shelby and the political opportunity that it offers,” Hewitt said.

Republicans say vast strides have been made in ballot access since the civil rights era, which is when the law's preclearance formula was first established. The initial law targeted states and localities with low minority turnout and a history of using hurdles such as literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise minority voters.

Such barriers are no longer used, and Republicans point to a swell of minority turnout in the last election as proof that many conservative-leaning states, particularly in the South, should not be subjected to preclearance.

They also point blame at Democrats, who in 2019 rejected a bipartisan bill to reestablish preclearance. Many Democrats instead favored their own measure, which would have eschewed the use of minority voter turnout data, a pillar of the original Voting Rights Act, while leaning heavily on looser standards, such as using the number of legal settlements and consent decrees issued in voting rights cases, to pull places into preclearance.

That would, Republicans argue, play into the hands of Democrats, who have built a sophisticated and well-funded legal effort to challenge voting rules in conservative-leaning states.

“It shunned objective data,” said Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project. “They want to target Georgia and Texas and Florida. But when you actually look at turnout data, it's Massachusetts that has half the Black turnout rate that Georgia does. That's why you get these games being played.”

Regardless, Democrats have a difficult climb to enacting their new bill under current Senate filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to advance legislation in a chamber that is split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made clear his opposition. He said last month that Democrats were aiming to achieve through the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act what they couldn't through their other elections bill, the For the People Act.

“It’s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already,” he said. “It is unnecessary.”

Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 election marked the highest voter turnout in U.S. history. More than 158 million ballots were cast, representing an estimated 66% of eligible voters, according to Pew Research Center.

And even with the logistical challenges presented by expanding mail-in voting, the Department of Justice in December said it found no evidence of widespread fraud, and then-President Donald Trump’s cybersecurity director called the 2020 election the “most secure in American history.”

While expanded voting access did not compromise the security of the 2020 election, Republican-run statehouses are creating more impediments for voters in upcoming elections, possibly reacting to unfounded claims of fraud.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice — a nonpartisan law and policy institute — state lawmakers have introduced 253 bills that would restrict voting access in 43 states, as of last month.

The bills, backed largely by Republicans, would take actions ranging from purging names from voter registration rolls to restricting absentee balloting — generally making it more difficult for Americans to cast a ballot.

Of those 253 bills, 50 of them (about 20%) come from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania — all of which went for Biden in 2020 after going for Trump In 2016.

But as the New York Times reports, Republicans’ push to institute stricter voting laws goes across the board and is likely fueled by Trump’s refusal to concede the election. Even in states like Iowa, where expanded access ran smoothly and still resulted in Republican wins, the GOP is curtailing voting rights.

Last month, Republicans voted along party lines to tighten absentee voting and impose other restrictions. In passing the vote State Sen. Jim Carlin, a Republican echoed lies from President Donald Trump about a “stolen” election.

“Most of us in my caucus and the Republican caucus believe the election was stolen,” Carlin said, according to the New York Times.

Trump, still widely popular among Republicans, began a campaign against expanded voting access in the months leading up to the 2020 election. Despite evidence that points to mail-in voting being a secure and bipartisan option to expand access, Trump claimed — often without evidence — that absentee ballots would lead to fraud.

After his loss to Biden, Trump continued to spread misinformation. He filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election, nearly all of which were thrown out of court. None had a significant impact on any state’s elections results.

Trump’s claims came to a head on Jan. 6, when thousands of his supporters rioted at the U.S. Capitol in an effort to halt the certification of Biden’s electoral college win. They were gathered in D.C. for a "stop the steal" rally, named after a rallying cry of Trump's supporters.

Five people died as a direct result of the riots, including a Capitol police officer.

While Trump was acquitted of inciting a riot, some prominent Republicans — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — continued to blame Trump for sparking the riot, citing his numerous false claims about the election.

Trump’s rhetoric continues to have an impact on Republicans’ faith in elections. In January, 72% of Republican respondents to a Vox poll said they question the results of the election.

Democratic lawmakers in the House have already passed a sweeping voting rights bill that would counteract the GOP efforts at state levels. However, the bill will likely face a tough road to passage in the Senate, where it would need the support of at least 10 Republicans to pass.

CNN —

Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon was arrested and removed from the Georgia Capitol on Thursday after passage of the state's sweeping elections bill restricting voting access.

After knocking on the office door during Republican Gov. Brian Kemp's signing of SB 202 — an election overhaul bill — Cannon is seen being led away by several officers with her hands cuffed behind her back.

In a video posted to social media, a Georgia Capitol police officer speaks with the Democrat outside the door to Kemp's office.

In the video, others in the Capitol with Cannon can be heard asking officers, "Why are you arresting her?"

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Attorney Gerald Griggs told CNN he is representing Cannon. Griggs said he was at the Fulton County jail working to bond Cannon out after she was booked on felony obstruction charges. CNN has reached out to the state Capitol police but has not independently confirmed the charges.

"We are getting her out of jail currently. We are gathering information on the case as well. There are multiple videos and we are in contact with the DA," Griggs told CNN.

CNN has reached out to Kemp's office for comment.

Video above: President Biden blasts new Georgia voting law

The ranks of big corporations now criticizing GOP efforts to restrict voting access spread Thursday to Texas as measures that would reduce options to cast ballots and limit polling hours advanced in the state Capitol.

American Airlines, which is based in Fort Worth, came out against restrictive voting measures that have a favorable path to reaching Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's desk in the coming weeks.

Public opposition from the airline came after a package of sweeping elections changes cleared the GOP-controlled Senate and, notably, a day after some of Georgia’s most prominent corporate leaders came out publicly against a new election law after civil rights activists criticized their silence.

“To make American’s stance clear: We are strongly opposed to this bill and others like it,” the airline said in a statement.

Unlike in Georgia, the corporate criticism in Texas to the election bills comes before they have been signed into law. Corporate interests carry big clout in the Texas Capitol, but Abbott and other Republicans have given no indication of wavering in their pursuit of passing the measures before the session ends in May.

The passage of Senate Bill 7 was along party lines in a vote after midnight early Thursday.

American Airlines' reaction to the bill advancing was slammed by Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the powerful Senate leader. “Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” Patrick said in a statement.

House Republicans on Thursday also began efforts to move a similar bill, known as House Bill 6, to the floor with nearly 200 people signed up to testify at a hearing.

Billionaire Michael Dell, whose tech company is headquartered in suburban Austin, tweeted his opposition to the bill as that hearing unfolded.

Critics of the Texas legislation say the efforts particularly target expanded access put into place during last year's election in Harris County, which is home to more than 2 million voters, controlled by Democrats and a key Texas battleground that includes Houston.

One measure would eliminate drive-thru voting, which more than 127,000 people around Houston used during early voting last year. More than half of those voters were Black, Latino or Asian, said Democratic state Sen. Carol Alvarado.

“Hearing all of that, who are you really targeting when you're trying to get rid of drive-thru voting?" she said.

Republicans rejected accusations that the bill was designed to suppress turnout.

“None of what we've discussed is voter suppression. And none of what we've discussed is Jim Crow,” Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt said.

The voting packages in Texas mirror a nationwide campaign by Republicans after former President Donald Trump made false claims about election fraud.

Voting rights groups say the measures would disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minority voters. In Texas, which already has some of the strictest voting laws in the U.S., the proposed legislation grants more power to partisan poll watchers and eliminates the option to cast a ballot via drive-thru. The bill also includes a provision requiring a doctor’s note for people with disabilities who want to vote by mail, although Republicans signaled during the debate that language could change.

Trump won Texas but by fewer than 6 points. It was the closest victory by any GOP presidential nominee in Texas since 1996, underscoring Republicans' loosening iron grip on the state.

After the Georgia bill was signed into law, some of the state's companies were roundly criticized, including by more than 70 Black corporate leaders who took out an advertisement in The New York Times urging corporate America to stand up forcefully on matters of racial justice.

After days of criticism and the boycott threat on social media, Delta CEO Ed Bastian took a stronger tone, calling the Georgia law unacceptable. “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true,” Bastian wrote, referring to Trump’s claims that he lost because of fraud.