By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, July 13, 2021
Republican “anti-voting laws,” President Joe
Biden claimed during his demagogic speech at the National
Constitution Center in Philadelphia this afternoon, are the most “significant
threat to our democracy since the Civil War.” These laws are “odious,”
“pernicious,” “vicious,” and “unconscionable,” a “subversion and suppression,”
the “21st-century Jim Crow,” and the sure sign of an emerging “autocracy.”
Biden’s fabricated panic offers lots of space for hyperbole, but precious
little room for specifics. I was prepared to fact-check Biden’s contentions
about new election laws, but the president offered few details. Perhaps he
comprehends that most Americans would probably find voter-integrity laws rather
innocuous.
Biden must also have sensed how preposterous his
hyperbole sounded, littering his speech with a bunch of “literallys” and “for
reals.” None of the voting laws passed in 17 states — some drafted better than
others — comes anywhere in the vicinity of “authoritarian.” To compare photo-ID
laws to Jim Crow is to cheapen history. Then again, Biden, doesn’t have a problem
using Goebbels’s “Big Lie” formulation, either — the kind of Nazi reference that Democrats pretend to be upset by when used by Republicans.
Not only didn’t we hear much from Biden about how these
“autocratic” laws work, we didn’t hear much about how H.R. 1 proposes
to save democracy. The closest the president came to offering any specifics was
to claim that new voter laws somehow legalize the intimidation of voters and
the tossing of legal ballots. Both of those things, of course, are already
illegal. The “For the People Act” would force states to count mail-in votes
that arrive up to ten days after Election Day; compel them to legalize ballot
harvesting; ban them from having voter-ID laws; empower bureaucrats to redraw
congressional districts; require states to allow felons to vote; undermine
free-speech rights by imposing a new array of burdens on civic groups, unions,
and nonprofit organizations; force states to count ballots cast by voters who are
in the wrong precincts; prohibit election officials from reviewing eligibility
of voters; and bar officials from removing ineligible voters from the rolls.
Most requirements found in H.R. 1 have never existed in
most states. So how could failing to implement them bring us to the edge of the
abyss? Biden claimed that failing to implement this new voting regime would be
a bigger threat to freedom than the Confederacy. “The Confederates, back then,
never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th,” the
president explained. “I’m not saying this to alarm you; I’m saying this because
you should be alarmed.” For one thing, the notion that the Republic was nearly
toppled by a mob of unarmed rioters on January 6 — or to intimate that what happened
that day is on par with a war over slavery that saw 620,000 lives lost — is
partisan panic-mongering. And to insinuate that any legislator passing
voter-integrity laws is in league with those rioters is a dumb smear.
Then again, Biden’s speech was little more than
performative politics. His agenda is stalled. His hyperbole was meant to
telegraph to progressive groups that he’s “fighting.” But to pass H.R. 1, Biden
would need to persuade moderate Democrats in places such as Arizona, Montana,
and West Virginia not only to hand over local elections to Washington but to
blow up the filibuster. This seems highly unlikely. (The filibuster,
incidentally, is most useful when slowing efforts such as H.R. 1, which would
nullify local laws and control by nationalizing things like elections.)
The second reason Biden likely gave this speech was to
preemptively corrode trust in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Biden spent the
first part of his talk bragging about how the United States had just conducted
the cleanest election in history, grousing about efforts to undermine trust in
our voting system. He then spent the rest of his time doing exactly that. Many
of the Democrats who can’t stop talking about the horrors of Trump’s “Big Lie”
had no compunction disputing results in Georgia or the presidential election
only a few years ago. Now, they are creating a ready-made justification for
delegitimizing any Republican victory.
Democrats have won numerous elections
across the country and nationally under laws they now claim are authoritarian.
They will likely win many more. The fact is that it is easier to vote today than ever before. Any citizen can
obtain an ID and request a mail ballot in every state. No amount of cynically
manufactured hysterics changes that fact.
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