Why treat the black electorate like helpless children? It’s clear that when blacks are sufficiently motivated, they have little trouble meeting the same requirements that other groups meet and casting a vote. Democrats continue to claim that Republicans are advocating modern-day poll taxes and literacy tests in disguise, even as evidence to the contrary continues to mount.

Actually, that’s not quite fair to Democrats. According to the polls, most Democrats—as well as most Republicans, liberals, conservatives, blacks and whites, don’t object to things like requiring people to prove who they say they are before voting. Liberal activists and their friends in the political press like to obsess over such things, but outside that bubble none of this is especially controversial.

In a saner political environment, Democrats and Republicans would stipulate both that Joe Biden won the presidency legitimately and that the pandemic election exposed significant flaws in our voting system that ought to be addressed in a bipartisan fashion as soon as possible. We have a closely divided House and Senate and a midterm election 19 months off. Yet in lieu of a sober discussion about voting procedures we have a surfeit of political posturing and scare-mongering, along with a president who believes, Trumplike, that his job description includes things like determining the location of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game.