So apparently, if you don’t support two voting bills President Joe Biden wants to pass — and if you don’t support ending the Senate filibuster on bills involving voting — you are no better than two of the worst people of the 20th century and one of the worst of the 19th.
“I ask every elected official in America,” Biden said in Atlanta during a passionate and wildly demagogic speech designed to make Twitter blue-checks do a Snoopy dance of joy while embracing an effort with no chance of actual success. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. 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?”
So congratulations to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the two Democratic senators who have made it plain they will not vote to kill the filibuster.
By not following him in lockstep, they are no better than the man who turned hoses on peaceful protesters in Birmingham.
They are standing in the schoolhouse door, shouting “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
They are even leading the Confederacy!
And here you thought Donald Trump was mean to Republicans.
As for Biden, the word “hypocrite” would seem to be too gentle to describe his own political gyration here. In his 36 years as a senator, he actively used the filibuster’s powers in nakedly partisan ways he spent much of his speech condemning current Senate Republicans for deploying.
Case in point: the years 2003 and 2004, when Republicans had a majority in the Senate and a president in the White House.
As a 2005 Washington Times editorial noted, “Democrats filibustered 10 circuit-court nominees. … Altogether, there were 20 cloture votes on the 10 circuit-court nominees. Mr. Biden was absent for one. He voted against cloture on 18 of the remaining 19 attempts.”
Yes, I know Democrats believe Republicans are now uniquely monstrous agents of evil while they are advocates for good — so when they used the filibuster to block Republicans, the filibuster was a gloriously moral tool.
In point of fact, according to Repustar, “During the 2019-2020 Congressional term, a record-breaking 328 filibusters were recorded with Democrats in the minority.”
Now, of course, that Republicans are in the minority, any use of the filibuster is evil.
But while Biden spent the speech attacking Republicans and singing of the glories of voting rules expanded on an emergency basis due to a pandemic, its real target were those recalcitrant Democrats who haven’t signed on to his progressive agenda.
He made his frustrations clear when he complained he’d been working quietly for two months talking about voting issues with people in his own party. “I’m tired of being quiet!” declared the least quiet man in American history — the man who blathered so much in the Senate that Barack Obama once wrote a note to an aide that said “Kill me now” when he rose to speak.
Here’s the truth: Biden isn’t mad at Manchin and Sinema because of voting rights. He’s mad because they are the reason he won’t get his multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better bill through.
And because BBB is basically dead, and because his COVID administration is incompetent, and because inflation is going bananas, Biden is staring political catastrophe in the face. He’s looking at a political year very much like the past six months — a time in which almost nothing good has happened for him and almost everything he does seems to deepen the hole he’s been digging for himself.
And so here it is — the pivot! Pivot to voting rights! Scare base Democratic voters, especially African Americans, into turning out in November 2022 by saying what he said in 2012 about Mitt Romney and the GOP — that they want “to put y’all back in chains.”
Yeah, good luck with that. Apparently, when choosing sides in American history, Joe Biden has chosen the side of Jimmy Carter.