Kamala Harris privately vented about Biden's refusal to publicly support a change to the Senate rules to pass voting-rights protections, book says

• A book says Kamala Harris was frustrated Biden didn't call for filibuster reform for voting rights.
• The new book details Harris' private vexation with the lack of progress on her portfolio of issues.

Vice President Kamala Harris privately vented that President Joe Biden made it hard for her to champion voting rights when he refused to call for reforming the Senate filibuster, a forthcoming book reportedly says.

The New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns shed more light on Harris' frustrations in "This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future," scheduled to be released in May.

Politico Playbook on Tuesday reported some details from the book about Harris' frustrations with Biden declining for months to advocate filibuster reform.

"How was she supposed to communicate clearly about voting-rights legislation, Harris asked West Wing aides, when the president would not even say that he supported changing the Senate rules to open the path for a bill?" Martin and Burns wrote, according to Politico.

Harris asked to take on voting rights as the signature issue in her portfolio early last year, aiming to seize on Democrats' control of both chambers of Congress to pass federal protections to counteract voting and election restrictions at the state level.

But the filibuster rules require a three-fifths majority of 60 votes to advance to debate on most legislation, and no Republican senators were willing to commit to voting for the sweeping voting-rights packages that Democrats wanted to pass, creating a stalemate in a Senate divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans with Harris as the tiebreaker.

And the White House remained tight-lipped in response to activists' mounting frustration about the lack of progress on voting rights, including the growing pressure for Biden to openly lobby for party-line changes to the filibuster.

Harris' vexation with the lack of progress on the issue compounded her dissatisfaction with other parts of her portfolio, especially immigration, and Harris' allies' concerns that she was sidelined and not prioritized by the White House, the book reportedly says and previous news reports have suggested.

"One senator close to her, describing Harris's frustration level as 'up in the stratosphere,' lamented that Harris's political decline was a 'slow-rolling Greek tragedy,'" Martin and Burns wrote in the book, according to Politico. "Her approval numbers were even lower than Biden's, and other Democrats were already eyeing the 2024 race if Biden declined to run."

Biden, who served in the chamber for 36 years before becoming the vice president and who maintains close relationships with many senators, was reluctant to publicly push the Senate to change the filibuster. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, also repeatedly demurred on the issue, saying it was a matter for Congress.

At one point, the book reportedly says, Harris directly told Biden that she couldn't effectively push for federal action on voting rights unless "voters knew that Biden himself was willing to back the procedural steps required" to pass the legislation.

In January, after months of holding back, Biden called for filibuster reform in a forceful speech on voting rights in Atlanta.

Describing the Senate as "a shell of its former self," Biden argued that the filibuster had been "weaponized" and "abused" while state legislatures were able to pass voting restrictions with simple majorities.

"I support changing the Senate rules whichever way they need to be changed to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights," Biden said.

A week later, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held a vote to create a special filibuster carveout for a voting-rights bill via the so-called nuclear option, which allows the Senate to change its own rules with a simple majority vote.

But Biden's plea to Senate Democrats to blow up the chamber's rules failed to move two key senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, whose votes were needed to change the filibuster rules.