“George Floyd should be alive,” read a statement released by Joe Biden Saturday. “He should be celebrating his 50th birthday with his young daughter Gianna, family, and friends. He deserved so much more.” The statement declared its intent to “honor his life and legacy.”

Clearly, Biden thought it was time to roll out his latest pandering to blacks with a birthday message for a symbolic figure in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Democrats depend on the monolithic black vote, which is why they pander like this at every opportunity, reminding blacks what perpetual victims they remain in a “systemically racist” society — despite 60 years of Democrat “solutions,” they fail to add. It’s also why Democrats browbeat and ostracize any black Americans who dare think for themselves outside the hive mind.

Before we get back to Biden’s statement, we must ask: Did Floyd deserve more? As a bearer of God’s image, yes, he certainly deserved better than to die under the knee of a police officer who was later convicted of murder. But that’s not really what Biden means. For his own political benefit, he means only to elevate Floyd’s status as a victim of the aforementioned oppression of society.

As our Douglas Andrews wrote in June 2020, George Floyd was not exactly a worthy martyr. In fact, he had a violent criminal history, and the cops were called on that fateful day because he had allegedly tried to use counterfeit money. He was belligerent with police because he had drugs in his system, which also contributed to his death.

That’s not to say Floyd deserved death for his crimes, but neither was he merely an innocent bystander whom racist cops chose to victimize.

In any case, none of that is really Biden’s point in elevating Floyd. Instead, the president crassly used the occasion to trot out one of the Democrats’ long-held policy agenda items: police “reform.” Congress failed to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in 2021 when negotiations broke down in the Senate. In a recurring theme of Biden’s presidency, however, he enacted as much of that bill as he could anyway via executive order.

Not only did he ban or restrict various police tactics at the federal level, but his statement reiterates that he directed “the use of federal tools to support similar reforms in state and local agencies.”

What did the Democrats’ version of police “reform” often look like? It meant defunding police departments around the country. It meant vilifying police and suppressing morale to the point that officers left departments in droves while recruiting plummeted. That was bad enough, but the timing couldn’t have been worse.

Floyd’s death, Biden said, “sparked one of the largest civil rights movements in our nation’s history and inspired the world.” In reality, it sparked a summer of rage in which mobs of Black Lives Matter and antifa radicals burned American cities, looted and vandalized stores, and killed dozens of people. Three years later, we’re still dealing with the crime wave launched by leftist radicals exploiting Floyd’s death.

According to Biden and his fellow Democrats, that crime isn’t the problem; racism is. “Our nation has never fully lived up to its highest ideal of fair and impartial justice for all under the law,” his statement said. Yes, there is two-tiered justice in this country. But it’s the kind that targets and imprisons conservatives and former presidents while shielding the current president and his corrupt son. It’s the kind where J6 rioters are locked up and BLM rioters go free.

Biden’s statement concludes with the kind of sanctimonious declaration that has come to define much of his presidency: “George Floyd’s memory reminds us that there is more work to do to redeem the soul of America.” Democrats ignore or trample the Constitution in service to an agenda that divides us by race and sex and income level. They create resentment and foment fear. By doing so, they are the ones destroying, not redeeming, the soul of America.