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April 27th, 2024

Insight

Biden's Big Elections Lie

David Harsanyi

By David Harsanyi

Published January 14, 2022

Biden's Big Elections Lie
President Joe Biden finally delivered his "voting rights" speech in Atlanta, telling a crowd:

"The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation's history. Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over injustice? I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend your right to vote, our democracy against all enemies foreign and domestic. And the question is: Where will the institution of the United States Senate stand?"

These were little more than the mendacious ravings of a demagogue.

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 11 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, 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.)

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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 10 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 for trying to see Nelson Mandela or didn't defend the Black Panthers in court or never participated in a sit-in.

But one can suspect 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.

(COMMENT, BELOW)


Previously:
01/07/22: Schumer's Ugly 'Voting Rights' Gamble
12/24/21:AOC's Grasp on American Governance Is a 'Farce'
12/17/21: Dems Pivot from Build Back Better to Useless Extremism
11/19/21: Reckoning' Over Steele Dossier?
10/15/21: The Biden White House Will Pay for Playing Inflation Games
09/24/21: The most demonstrable political scandal still ignored
09/17/21: Sorry, AOC, The Rich Already Pay Their Fair Share
09/02/21: Why Isn't Biden to Blame for COVID-19 Deaths?
08/06/21: Biden's Unprecedented Attack on the Constitution
07/30/21: Jan. 6 Was Deplorable. It Was NOT a Coup
06/21/21: The Myth of Republican Obstructionism
05/21/21: What Does Putin Have on Biden?
04/16/21: Kristen Clarke Is Unfit to Be in Government
03/26/21: No to DC Statehood is far from GOP being reflexive
03/22/21: Biden Prepares to Strip College Students of Due Process Rights The Hypocrisy of the Filibuster Busters
03/12/21: Biden Prepares to Strip College Students of Due Process Rights
03/05/21: AOC's Terrible Minimum Wage Argument
02/12/21: The Dem Party Is Radicalizing against the Constitution
02/05/21: What NOT to Do with Marjorie Taylor Greene
01/15/21: Free Speech Is a Value Not Just a Right
12/31/20: It Can't Get Any Worse Than 2020. Here's a 2021 Political Wish List
10/26/20: Wanted: An Honest Debate about the Death Penalty
10/26/20: These are the questions 'Big Guy' Biden must be forced to answer about Hunter's emails
09/11/20: The Dems' Dangerous Delegitimization of the Election
08/28/20: Biden Is Underperforming Hillary in Battleground States
08/14/20: Kamala Harris, Imaginary Centrist
07/24/20: Who you calling a fascist?
07/17/20: Speech Police have finally gone too far
07/03/20: 'But Gorsuch' Is Still Trump's Best Argument
06/22/20: Welcome to America's Cultural Revolution
06/12/20: The color of my skin is not an indictment of my morality, nor does it strip me of my agency
06/05/20: What this son of immigrants knows about bulding bussinesses --- and the dismay of destruction
05/28/20: The Folly of Twitter's Fact-Check
05/22/20: Dems Warning Trump Will Reject Election Results Should Look in the Mirror
05/15/20: Obamagate Is NOT a Conspiracy Theory
05/08/20: Really, Joe --- due process is the opposite of justice?