In his speech on Tuesday about Republican election laws, Joe Biden said, “We’re are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War.”
Actually, Joe, that is hyperbole, and offensive hyperbole at that. Black Americans were denied the vote on a vast scale for a century after the Civil War; maybe it is just me, but that seems worse than anything that happened in 2020 or 2021.
It has never been easier to vote in America. Voter participation has been rising steadily for the past two decades. Americans of every class and color turned out in droves in 2018 and 2020, and they probably will again in 2022 and 2024.
The Supreme Court recently ruled that judges in Voting Rights Act cases should look at how easy it is to vote overall in a state. Democrats threw a fit. Chuck Schumer called it “one of the darkest days in all of the Supreme Court’s history.”
If we were really facing a “21st century Jim Crow assault” on voting rights” and “a new wave of unprecedented voter suppression,” as Biden claims, it would not be all that big a burden to have to prove in court that it is hard to vote.
A new “Jim Crow?” Biden is old enough to remember the real Jim Crow; he is old enough, in fact, to have been good buddies with a lot of segregationist Democratic senators. Back in 2019, Kamala Harris attacked him in a debate over that. But all is forgotten now. A lot has to be forgotten if you’re Joe Biden.
As they did with Georgia’s election law, Democrats are now telling tall tales about a Republican election bill in Texas. Biden claimed that the Texas legislature “wants to allow partisan poll watchers to intimidate voters and imperil impartial poll workers.” Actually, the Texas law requires poll watchers to take an oath to “not disrupt the voting process or harass voters.”
In Georgia, the Democrats’ stunts resulted in moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, harming many local black-owned businesses. Texas Democrats, like their Georgia counterparts, are playing to a national media audience instead of doing what the people of their state want. A majority of the Republican-controlled legislature wants to pass the bill, so Democratic legislators fled the state so no vote could be held. They marked the gravity of the situation by drinking beer on the bus and flying without masks, but then put on a show in Washington of singing “We Shall Overcome” to any camera they could find.
Biden cheered the Texas Democrats and sent Harris to meet with them. Because nothing says you care about democracy like refusing to let the people’s representatives vote. Biden and Harris have spent the past few months complaining about Republican filibusters in Washington. I guess that has been forgotten now, too.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review.
Twitter: @BaseballCrank