Joe Biden and Democrats, urged on by the mainstream corporate media, are engaged in a dangerous theater of the absurd.
They have made alleged Republican voter suppression a centerpiece of their messaging. You know, like requiring some legitimate form of identification to vote, which not long ago was compared to Jim Crow 2.0 but now is accepted even by most Democrat politicians who can read the polling on the subject.
Then there was the Georgia law, which arguably expanded voting access. And now it’s Texas, which is so anti-democratic it “requires at least 9 hours/day of early voting during the early voting period, and requires 12 hours/day during the last week of early voting in large counties.”
None of this is real. No more real than Texas Democratic legislators claiming the situation is so grave that they fled to D.C. to preclude a quoram and thereby shut down the Texas legislature from acting on the voting law. They chanted “we shall overcome,” as if 12 hours of voting every day the final week of an election is Jim Crow 3.0.
But Joe Biden topped is all today with a speech claiming we are in a national emergency and our Democracy faces a threat from voting supression the likes of which we have not seen “since the Civil War”:
“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole, since the Civil War.”
Biden is using these over-the-top threats of national emergency to trample the civil liberties of Americans who oppose Democrats. It’s exploitation and hyperbole for a reason.
But it’s more. It’s also a ploy to put pressure on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to back off their pledge not to bust the legislative filibuster standing in the way of Democrats nationalizing voting procedure, weakening anti-fraud provisions, and creating mail-in and other procedures open to manipulation. In other words, while Joe Biden claims he is defending voting rights, he is doing the opposite.
Greg Sargent at WaPo is a pretty good barometer of insider Democrat strategy. He gives away the game, it’s all about convincing Democrat holdouts on the filibuster to carve out an exception for Democrats’ voting legislation:
But if our democracy faces an existential threat — as Biden told us — then doesn’t it require him to prevail on Democrats to carve out an exception to the filibuster, to pass legislative fixes that will mitigate that threat? …Once such a voter suppression-and-election subversion package has the backing of 50 Democratic Senators, it should get a vote. When Republicans filibuster it, Biden would then have to go to Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and suggest it’s time to consider revising the filibuster to get this done, and if that doesn’t work, suspending it.Yet Biden didn’t mention the filibuster in his speech.Sen. Merkley tells me, however, that this needn’t preclude action. Merkley notes that by instructing Congress to get this done with great urgency, Biden is in effect telling the Senate Democratic caucus that they must find a way no matter what….By elevating the threat with such alarm and investing it with such gravity, he has placed the bar high for himself, and has given us a standard to hold him to.
That’s it. That’s what all this theater of the absurd is about. Busting the filibuster so Democrats can destroy voting protections to their benefit.
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