Are You With Joe Biden, or Jefferson Davis? The President’s speech on voting rights is divorced from reality.
Every official in America, President Biden said Tuesday, has a choice: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. [ Martin Luther ] King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis ?” Seriously, he said that grandiloquent nonsense.
Mr. Biden’s speech in Georgia was a call to bulldoze the Senate’s filibuster to pass a rebranded version of H.R.1, a bill that would impose a federal election code on all 50 states, including forcing them to count late mail ballots that lack postmarks. If you happen to think that’s a bad idea, or that it’s unconstitutional, or that nuking the filibuster would hurt the Senate, well, then apparently you’re against Abraham Lincoln.
Mr. Biden’s demagoguery is all the worse because he continues to distort state voting laws like the one in Georgia. “Voting by mail is a safe and convenient way to get more people to vote,” he said, adding “they’re limiting the number of dropboxes and the hours you can use them.” Georgia had zero dropboxes before the pandemic election of 2020, and now they’re enshrined in permanent law. This isn’t “ Jim Crow 2.0,” no matter how many times Mr. Biden uses that incendiary phrase.
People disagree about the security of stand-alone dropboxes, but voters can also put absentee ballots in the mailbox. As for Georgia, all of its residents can request a mail ballot without giving an excuse, unlike in New York or Delaware. And here’s a figure Mr. Biden should know: In 2020, the Census Bureau says, black voter turnout in Georgia was 64%, compared with Massachusetts’s 36%.
Mr. Biden also sketched out how he thinks the GOP plans to steal the next election: “The Georgia Republican Party, the state Legislature, has now given itself the power to make it easier for partisan actors, their cronies, to remove local election officials.” He said that passing the Democratic Party’s latest version of H.R.1, now called the Freedom to Vote Act, would prevent this kind of “election subversion.”
Yet if you read the Senate bill he supports, it has a provision saying that states could not suspend local election officials except for “gross negligence, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The Georgia law that Mr. Biden is attacking features an almost identical standard. Before the state can oust a local election official, it must show, by clear and convincing evidence, “nonfeasance, malfeasance or gross negligence” over a period of “at least two elections.”
Mr. Biden’s filibuster foray is likely to fail amid bipartisan opposition, but the more he fails the more partisan and distorted his speeches get. It’s a bad presidential look.
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