By David Harsanyi
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
These were little more than the mendacious ravings
of a demagogue. President Joe Biden delivered his “voting rights”
speech in Atlanta today, telling a crowd:
The next few days, when these bills
come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation. Will we choose
democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know
where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend your right to
vote and our democracy against all enemies foreign and domestic. And so the
question is where will the institution of the United States Senate stand?
Biden’s argument is predicated on the idea that anyone
who continues to support the legislative filibuster — a Senate rule the
president defended for nearly 50 years — or voter-ID laws, or time restrictions
on mail-in ballots, or consistent hours for early voting, or bans on ballot
harvesting is no better than Bull Connor. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr.
King or George Wallace?” was the false choice offered by a man who repeatedly
praised Wallace, and other segregationists, early in his career.
The president suggested that anyone opposing the
Democrats’ voting-rights bill was not only a bigot but a seditious “domestic”
enemy of the United States — a designation that now probably includes six Democratic senators, if not more. The
president pronounced the Senate a “shell of its former self,” lamenting that
the GOP had used the filibuster over 100 times in the past year, skipping the
inconvenient fact that Democrats had done so over 300 times the preceding four
years. Biden, “the institutionalist,” then unloaded a litany of completely
misleading contentions about voting laws to justify his abandonment of
principle.
And the reason Biden is compelled to lie about virtually
every aspect of the Georgia voting law is that the specifics are actually quite
popular and do not inhibit a citizen from casting a ballot. Most of the
requirements Biden contends are now compulsory for democracy to properly
function had only been instituted in the past few years — many of them only
during the last election. Biden’s comparing Jim Crow to contemporary
voter-integrity laws is detestable. One was a violent suppression of the
minority vote; the other was giving voters only eleven weeks
before an election to request a ballot and declining to keep expanding voting
into the weekend.
At this pace, Democrats will be arguing that disenfranchisement
of illegal immigrants is the manifestation of the Dixiecrat agenda by
2024.
ID requirements are what the Left detests most, and yet
this is the provision they talk about least. Why? Most polls find overwhelming
majority support for limiting early-voting hours and
requiring photo IDs to vote. Fascists in Colorado and
Connecticut and most other states, not only Georgia, still demand a person
provide government-issued ID to vote. They, just like Georgia, allow voters
without ID to provide the last four digits of their Social Security
number, a bank statement or utility bill, a paycheck, or any
other government document with their name and address. (Maybe if states allowed vaccine passports to suffice, Democrats would
be up for it.) But most Americans — most people in the free world — have believed it eminently
reasonable to expect voters to identify themselves before participating in
democracy. If Democrats believed the vote was sacred, so would they. It’s the
Democrats who are advocating overturning the will of voters in Georgia and
elsewhere. Let’s remember that H.R. 1 “voting rights” bill would have compelled
states to allow ballot harvesting, to ban voter-ID laws, to allow felons to
vote, and to count mail-in votes that arrive up to ten days after Election Day.
The president sprinkled his speech with feigned
indignation and lots of podium pounding. Unable to contain his penchant for
fabulism, he seemed to joke about being arrested (“the first time”)
during a civil-rights march. Maybe Biden was confusing that incident with the
time he wasn’t arrested in South Africa trying to see
Nelson Mandela or didn’t defend the Black Panthers in court or never participated in a sit-in.
But one suspects most Democrats understand well that this
is all a nasty bit of cynical political theater since there is little chance of
nuking the filibuster. Biden’s attempt to launch his entire agenda in a single
reconciliation moonshot stuffed with progressive extravagances failed to get a
simple majority. Stymied, the president has decided to preemptively undermine
confidence in the 2022 and 2024 elections, smearing half the country as racists
while cosplaying as a civil-rights hero. “The Big Lie,” indeed. The
consequences of this will be the further deterioration of trust in elections.
More division. More anger.
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