John Fund

Joe Biden’s voting rights smears

(Photo: Getty)

President Joe Biden delivered one of the most demagogic speeches of any modern president on Tuesday. You might say it even had Trumpian tones.

Having seen his Build Back Better spending plan fall into a legislative ditch, a frustrated Biden has decided to run to the nearest mudhole and start throwing its contents at his opponents.

The supposed purpose of these remarks, delivered on the grounds of Morehouse College in Georgia, was to push two bills that would nationalise the election process and ban states from enacting voter integrity measures of their own. The problem is that he simply doesn’t have the votes to pass these bills — and he knows it. All 50 Democrats might — in theory — vote for it. But every Republican is opposed to what they view as a naked power grab. And they will block consideration of the bill through use of the filibuster.

So, Biden declared his support for ditching the Senate filibuster, which requires 60 out of 100 senators to move legislation to the floor, and he demanded the historic reform be jammed through on a purely partisan vote.

But that won’t work either, because two Democratic senators — Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — are clearly opposed to upending Senate tradition and four or so more Democratic senators have grave reservations.

The president’s announcement was a blatant piece of political theatre and it’s not going anywhere.

But what truly made your head spin was the embarrassing spectacle, riddled with outright lies and vicious smears, that followed.

Biden framed the entire speech around a theme he raised in his remarks marking the first anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But this time, Biden called the Capitol riot ‘a coup’.

The definition of a coup is ‘a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government.’ Given that a ‘coup’ also suggests a coordinated effort to seize control of the military and central government institutions, you’d have to grade Biden as going beyond the usual hyperbole there.

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