Biden blasts GOP voting restrictions push: 'The big lie is just that -- a big lie!'

President Joe Biden delivered a major speech Tuesday from Philadelphia on voting rights as his administration wades more aggressively into the fight over ballot access.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday decried Republican efforts to limit ballot access across the country as a "21st century Jim Crow assault," while warning Americans that the GOP push to restrict voting and "selfish" challenge of the 2020 election results were "the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War." "There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today, an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are as Americans," Biden said at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. While he encouraged more Americans to participate in the political process, Biden stopped short of endorsing changes to the Senate filibuster rule that would allow Democrats to pass voting rights measures with a simple majority vote -- something advocates, and many Democrats have begged him to support. Calling for a coalition of Americans across party and class lines to meet "the urgency of the moment" and stand up to GOP-led efforts in 16 states to rewrite voting laws, Biden also asked Congress to take up Democrats' proposed overhaul of the federal election system, the For the People Act, which has stalled in the Senate amid GOP opposition.