In Brief: Biden’s Disgraceful Voting Speech
He’s had a long career of demagogic speeches, but he outdid himself with his cynical rant in Georgia.
We covered Biden’s Big ‘Voting Rights’ Lie Wednesday, but National Review’s editors were just as appalled as we were.
In a push to pass two sweeping Democratic voting bills federalizing a swath of election rules, Biden took a rhetorical sledgehammer to the legitimacy of America’s elections and identified opponents of the bills as domestic “enemies” on par with some of the most reprehensible figures in U.S. history.
It was a disgraceful performance, witless and sloppy even by Joe Biden’s standards.
He picked Georgia as the location of his speech because the state has been smeared by the Left, with Stacey Abrams leading the way, as a hotbed of voter suppression for years, culminating in last year’s election-reform bill signed into law by Republican governor Brian Kemp.
The truth is that the Peach State “long ago adopted some of the rules now considered indispensable to democracy,” and now has so many residents registered to vote that “The League of Women Voters in Georgia has complained that it’s hard to find anyone new to register to vote.”
The charge now is that Georgia’s reforms will reverse all this. It simply isn’t true. The law doesn’t limit no-excuse absentee voting, and expands hours available for early voting.
In his indictment, Biden specifically mentioned long lines, which are a function of incompetent local election administration, not state policy (and the reform law tries to address long lines); limits on drop-boxes, a pandemic innovation that is being preserved, if scaled back; allegedly making it harder to vote by mail, presumably a reference to the state’s moving away from signature match as a way to verify ballots — signatures have long been thought to be too inexact — and using driver’s license numbers instead; and restrictions on giving food and water to voters standing in line, a provision meant to prevent politicking among voters in line that was inspired by a similar rule in New York State.
Biden’s push for Democrat “voting rights” legislation is beyond disingenuous. The editors conclude:
Biden declared our democracy in crisis and said it had to be fixed over the next couple of days. That’s when the Senate is supposed to eliminate the filibuster on the narrowest possible partisan vote — never mind that Biden has been a passionate defender of the filibuster for decades — and then pass sweeping bills nationalizing our elections on the narrowest possible partisan votes. Absent the political equivalent of a meteor strike, none of this will happen. So Biden will have further undermined the legitimacy of our elections for no reason even on his own terms. Perhaps he thinks it’s worth it to play to his party’s base, but surely Democrats will notice — and feel let down — when the alleged crisis the president says absolutely must be addressed is not addressed.
So the Georgia speech wasn’t just low and dishonest, it was likely politically incompetent as well — the Biden trifecta.
