Opinion: Biden’s disturbing voting rights demagoguery goes beyond politics

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President Biden’s position on voting rights is not merely an effort to manage what happens during elections. His words are much more threatening for many Americans.

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All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.

Was President Joe Biden’s demagogic speech about voting rights just politics, or was there something more nefarious at play?

At Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, President Biden delivered arguably some of the most irresponsible, unhinged, and disturbing remarks of his nearly 50-year career in Washington.

In claiming to “protect the sacred, constitutional right to vote,” Biden savaged the mainly Republican-led legislatures in the country who are attempting to pass laws aimed at achieving exactly that.

He called Georgia’s latest law, which is in many cases weaker than the laws in several blue states, including his native Delaware, “vicious.” Where he actually got specific about issues with the laws, he was dishonest.

He claimed Texas “wants to allow partisan poll watchers to intimidate voters and imperil impartial poll workers.”

The law actually requires that poll watchers take an oath explicitly vowing “not [to] disrupt the voting process or harass voters” in discharging their duties.

The laws Biden caricatured by and large concern securing absentee and mail-in voting—reversing the extraordinary, pandemic-driven, security-threatening, confidence-sapping, legitimacy-imperiling practices employed during the 2020 election, the first mass mail-in election in U.S. history.

It’s only reasonable that the further you get from in-person elections, with voter ID, on a single election day, the greater the chance for mischief, fraud, and corruption. All of which undermines confidence in the system and the system itself.

But by the Biden standard, anything less than the dubious voting measures taken in 2020 would constitute an attack on our republic. Every election in U.S. history before 2020, would constitute an attack on our republic.

Biden said that the laws being considered and in some cases enacted across America are a:

“21st century Jim Crow assault… the most dangerous threat to voting and integrity of free and fair elections in our history… To me, this is simple… This is election subversion; an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty.”

Not to be outdone, Biden added:

“We’re are (sic) facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.”

These remarks came amid his Justice Department’s embarrassing effort to sue Georgia over its election law just as allegations mount in the Peach State of material illegal voting and other fraud in the 2020 election that Biden strained during his speech to suggest was totally unimpeachable.

Biden’s Justice Department is similarly challenging Arizona’s Maricopa County audit on—sticking with the Jim Crow theme—civil rights grounds.

Of course if you thought the 2020 election was 100 percent above board, you’d be happy to let your opponents humiliate themselves with these fruitless efforts. You also wouldn’t need to resort to such exaggeration.

Why all this hyperbolic rhetoric?

Some say Biden’s bombast was aimed at pressuring more sober Democrat Senators to push for a filibuster “carveout” to ram the misnamed For the People Act through.

Others say he’s just playing to fired up progressives.

But you’ve got to consider the broader context to the President casting up to half the country as not just bigots, and “subverters,” but enemies of the state.

Invoking Jim Crow, or equating January 6th with the Civil War shouldn’t be taken as just throwaway lines meant to troll Trump voters.

As we covered in a previous op-ed, the Biden administration’s chilling National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism says that “racism and bigotry… perpetuate the domestic terror threat;” that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists… present the most lethal DVE [domestic violent extremism] threat;” and that “narratives of fraud in the recent general election…will almost certainly spur some DVEs [domestic violent extremists] to try to engage in violence this year.”

If one can draw a straight line from supporting voting integrity to racism to terrorism, and if the Biden administration is comparing voting integrity supporters—or skeptics about the 2020 election who would support such measures—to Confederates, shouldn’t the American people be a bit concerned?

And remember, FBI Director Christopher Wray declared the Capitol Riot an act of domestic terrorism.

The DOJ National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section is prosecuting some of the cases – all of this occurring in spite of the fact that as I’ve argued at length in writing and on air, the more we’ve learned, the more we’ve seen that the narrative that January 6th was an armed, murderous insurrection was false.

Meanwhile, as American Greatness’ Julie Kelly notes, “Nearly every charging document filed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department in the Capitol breach probe mentions the defendant’s belief about the 2020 presidential election as evidence of wrongdoing.”

Judges have agreed with prosecutors in some cases to deny defendants bail based on the idea that their views on the election make them a danger.

You don’t have to read closely between the lines to see that the Biden administration is redefining dissent to its agenda as a danger to the homeland.

It’s pledging to pursue that threat with its first-of-its-kind, whole-of-society domestic terror policy.

President Biden’s words, again ironically delivered at the National Constitution Center, should not be dismissed as mere bluster or just politics.

They should be taken deathly seriously.

Judging by the apparent political persecution at hand in the treatment of the Capitol Rioters, as noted by Democrats like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin—seemingly the model for the Biden administration’s domestic terror strategy—this is exactly the message his administration intends to deliver.