I’ll confess that I didn’t tune in for President Joe Biden’s “major speech on voting rights” in Philadelphia yesterday, so I had to catch the highlight reel this morning. The fawning media was pitching the address as a “fiery” assault on alleged voting “restrictions” being passed in a number of red states. What it really added up to was a long collection of distortions and outright lies, peppered with unsupported allegations and claims. He included some slams for the voting integrity bill in Georgia (which actually includes more voting options and a longer window than New York) before moving on to the pending bill in Texas. That’s when things really got heated and the baseless allegations began flowing like we were watching an editorial segment on MSNBC. (Daily Wire)

“In Texas, for example, Republican-led state legislature wants to allow partisan poll watchers to intimidate voters and imperil and impartial poll workers,” Biden claimed.

“They want voters to [inaudible] further and be able to be in a position where they wonder who’s watching them and intimidating them, to wait longer to vote, to drive a hell of a lot long–, excuse me, a long way to get to vote,” he said. “They want to make it so hard and inconvenient that they hope the people don’t vote at all. That’s what this is about. This year alone, 17 states have enacted, not just proposed, but enacted 28 new laws to make it harder for Americans to vote, not to mention, and catch this, nearly 400 additional bills, Republican members of the state legislatures are trying to pass. The 21st century Jim Crow assault is real. It’s unrelenting. We’re gonna challenge it vigorously.”

Biden was attacking voter ID laws and poll monitors, invoking everything from the Civil War to Jim Crow. Of course, not once did he offer any specifics to back up this rhetoric. He’s just following the talking points being repeated on liberal cable news stations. When it comes to Texas specifically, he repeated a lie that you hear on CNN multiple times per day, as Karen recently pointed out.

Democrats are lying about the bill:

"What the bill in Texas actually does is increase early voting hours, provide additional drop boxes, and assure mail-in ballots include voter identification."

— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) July 14, 2021

The attacks on poll monitors (supplied by both parties, by the way) as some sort of voter intimidation tactic are particularly rich. Monitors aren’t there to watch the voters. They are there to ensure that the ballots are handled and counted correctly, so they’re watching the poll workers. Do you know who is opposed to having impartial observers monitor the process? People with something to hide.

What was more surprising to me was the fact that Biden and his party are still flogging the dead horse of voter ID laws. As we’ve been discovering over the course of the past year, a significantly large majority of Americans support voter ID laws, including a majority of Black voters. I’ve yet to hear a cogent argument out of any of them as to how such a requirement “suppresses” anyone’s ability or right to vote, particularly when anyone who needs one can get an ID for free. (Unless you live out in the country where people haven’t heard of the invention of photocopiers, of course.)

This brings me back to the fundamental question that I never hear Joe Biden or any of the congressional Democrats or the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC offering an answer to. Can someone please show me where all of these people are who are supposedly unable to register or unable to cast their votes? We just finished yet another set of elections last November that set records for turnout. All across the country, there were people going up and down the streets with stacks of voter registration forms, begging people to fill one out if they hadn’t done so already. A majority of states already allow you to vote early if you wish. Rideshare companies were literally offering free rides to and from the polls for anyone who wanted them.

And yet we have these people trying to make political hay out of claims that Republicans are “making it even harder to vote.” Seriously? We’re currently about three steps away from having people going door to door and dragging people to the polls at gunpoint. This is apparently the American political landscape in the 2020s. The silly season never ends anymore.