Traveling to Philadelphia Tuesday, President Joe Biden laid out in apocalyptic terms the gravity of the “threat” to American democracy from Republican efforts to reform and rewrite state election laws.
“We are 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 Jan. 6.”
Biden is inviting a comparison of what he faces with what Abraham Lincoln faced when he took office in 1861 with seven Southern states having voted to secede and Fort Sumter a month away.
The Republican “threat” to our democracy, implied Biden, is mortal.
“I never thought in my entire career I’d ever have to say it. But I swore an oath to you, to God — to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. And that’s an oath that forms a sacred trust to defend America against all threats both foreign and domestic.
“The assault on free and fair elections is just such a threat.”
Republicans seek to deny “full and free and fair elections” and are engaged in “the most un-American thing that any of us can imagine, the most undemocratic, the most unpatriotic.”
Un-American? Undemocratic? Unpatriotic?
When Sen. Joseph McCarthy challenged the patriotism of Truman Democrats in such terms in the 1950s, he was censured by the Senate.
Is Biden really saying that minor alterations in election laws, all of which would have to pass muster with federal courts and the Supreme Court, represent an existential threat to our republic?
This is beyond hyperbole. It is ridiculous. It is absurd.
Such hype is a measure of just how far out of touch with the real world the rhetoric of our reigning elites has drifted.
Yet, by casting himself and his party as today’s party of Lincoln, and Republican governors as Confederates, with the stakes equal to the survival of the Union, Biden has raised the stakes of this minor political skirmish.
And raised the political risk to himself, if he fails, as is likely.
Biden has just shoved a large pile of his political chips into the middle of the table in a show of confidence that he can bring off Senate passage of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, when both pieces of legislation look to be certain losers.
Neither has the 60 votes needed for passage. Neither has a single Republican vote. Nor is there evidence either can gain the 50 Democratic votes in the Senate that would require a unanimous caucus.
And if either measure got the 50 votes needed for passage, Democrats would still need 50 votes to break a GOP filibuster. Yet, Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are opposed to abolishing the filibuster. As six-term Sen. Joe Biden appears to be himself.
Is Biden putting on a show of defiance for the progressive wing of his party? For, again, what is at issue here so critical as to elicit comparison with a Civil War that cost 600,000 American lives?
To prevent voting legislation from being enacted into law, Texas Democrats fled from the state legislature in Austin and from Texas itself — to deny Republicans a quorum.
And what do the liberal and progressive Texans fear?
Two pieces of legislation, says The New York Times:
“Both measures would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending absentee ballot applications to voters who had not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit the types of assistance that can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.”
Are such modest proposals, all within the prerogatives of state government under the Constitution, truly a threat to the republic as serious as the possibility of a second Civil War?
Democrats are faking this, casting themselves in the familiar role of progressives fighting heroically for democracy against neo-fascist forces of the right.
Declared Biden at the National Constitution Center: “The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real. It’s unrelenting.”
Yet, with all his rhetoric placing himself in the tradition of Lincoln, and casting Republicans in the role of die-hard segregationists and vote deniers, Biden is promising something he almost surely cannot deliver.
What lies ahead?
Having raised the stakes in this fight, Biden has raised the cost of his likely defeat. The probable elements of that defeat will be a failure to bring about a unanimous Democratic Senate vote or the refusal of Democratic senators to break a Republican filibuster.
Out of this will come anger at Biden among progressives for his not going public to demand suspension of the filibuster, rage at Manchin and Sinema and other Democratic senators who secretly back retention of the filibuster, another victory for Sen. Mitch McConnell, and more lost time for the bigger items on the Biden agenda.
All the price of Joe Biden’s absurd rhetorical hype.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
Biden is confused. Biden is not Lincoln, he (Biden) is like Blinken, his Secretary of State. Biden and Blinken are communists.
For one thing, BACK THEN THE CONFEDERATES were mostly the DEMOCRAT PARTY, attacking the more Republican north.
EXACTLY like how it is now, where DEMOCRATS ARE ATTACKING conservatives, yet again.
There he is in his favorite PR photo—ain’t he cool in his aviator shades?
“I never thought in my entire career I’d ever have to say it. But I swore an oath to you, to God — to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. And that’s an oath that forms a sacred trust to defend America against all threats both foreign and domestic.”
“The assault on free and fair elections is just such a threat.”
How they speak such irrefutable truths in their flowery speeches—and that ends up being the extent of it. How true are his words and how completely devoid of them are his actions. As for the “assault on free and fair elections”—you stole the 2020 Presidential election with an avalanche of fake votes and the help of obliging criminal elements—that must be the type of election you are referring to because you would not have won any other way.
AND is it not strange, how the LEFT was the ones who LITERALLY ATTACKED voters at voting stations (SEE black panthers, under obama), or KICKED OUT voting booth monitors, YET THEY CLAIM WE conservatives are the ones ‘attacking the freedoms’ of elections!?!?
POT meet kettle.
The democrat party is noted for trying to ” Pack the Supreme Court whenever they have a democrat president like Franklin D. Roosevelt or A far – Leftist president like Joe Biden. The present time ,to the Marxist democrat party hiearchy, seems like an idea time to again try to pack the Court so that they can get their radical leftist legislation passed by the Supreme Court if everything else faills. But trying to pack the Supreme Court may fail just as it did when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried but failed . Perhaps The Joe Biden democrat president will agaon hear these words, ” It was never realistic that this plan,… To pack the Supreme Court,… ” Would pass… “
If Joe’s the next Lincoln, then he has come to free the criminals from accountability, starting with the Biden Crime Family. Unlike Lincoln, he thinks he can “fool all the people all the time” and just makes a fool of himself in the trying.
“My concern is not whether God is on our side. My greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.” – Abraham Lincoln,,,,,,,,,Joe has not one twit of a concern that God is on his side unless you understand that to Joe, Government is the God from whom all American blessings must flow, and the internet media is the new age biblical keeper of Human truths that now creates god government in their own image, which currently is an age debilitated man with a decrepit mind and sense of fair play or morality, being led by a corrupted party of secular self-god anointed fools, which now reflects the worst examples of all races currently residing in America way too anxious to change the country from bad to worse.
“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle” – Lincoln ,,,,and Joe has been hustling himself for the past 50 years and doing a better job sandbagging THE PEOPLE than Fast Eddie did on Minnesota Fats. The only existential threat Joe perceives from the new laws is to his party and his power.
Marxist democrat President, “Joe Biden, thinks hes Abraham Lincoln . Joe Biden think of himself as another Lincoln reminds me of a more recent time when Republican Dan Quale was in a debate with Floyd Bensen, Marxist canidate for vice President.when Loyd Bentsen made this remark to Dan Quayle, ” I knew Jack Kennedy, he was a friend of mine, Senator, your no Jack Kennedy . ” Some one should tell Joe Biden, You, sir, are no Abra ham Lincoln .
Well, in his defense, he does have Dementia. He reminds me so much of my 98 YO, MIL in his ramblings and false telling of stories. It’s uncanny the similarities.
Oh, my MIL is in a Memory Care facility.
Then, do you believe that there is still hope for ABRAHAM Lincoln, oh, i was referring to JOE BIDEN….
What the liberals are trying to shove through regarding voting laws ARE existential threats to democracy. As with essentially all liberals Biden likes to call good evil and evil good.
Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States,
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Each State has the right to establish its own voting Laws.
But this dishonorable, traitorous, socialist Democrat Party wants to force the States to follow the dishonorable, traitorous, socialist Democrat Party’s unlawful, dishonest, unethical, corrupt voting agendas, thus permitting the Democrat Party to force any elected official upon our citizens, regardless whether the citizens voted for them or not.
They don’t WANT any state determining for itself what voting rules there are.. THEY WANT TO federalize the whole shebang.. BUT THEY CLAIM “they are the party of the constitution”.
Yea, right. Pull the other leg dems.. It has bells on.
Joe Biden has been living in his own little world that to.him, bad, is good and Good, is bad but part of this cause for his confusion is that he is a Marxist democrat….
“We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”
That is, since Democrats tried to destroy our Republic, bringing about the Civil War. That is, the war fought predominantly by white Americans to save the Republic and free black slaves from their predominantly Democrat slave owners. “Our democracy” or rather our Republic was saved, in spite of Democrat insistence that it be splintered, and slaves were freed in spite of Democrat insistence that they remain as property with no rights.
I wonder why Biden and other Democrat mouthpieces insist on referring back to the Civil War. This was such a terrible indictment of Democrats, leading to their ongoing vile treatment of black people including Jim Crow (which they are now also insisting on reminding us about) that it doesn’t make sense. Of course, in a nation where history is no longer taught I suppose most people don’t know the sordid history of Democrats, slavery, Jim Crow and the efforts to destroy our nation.
Fortunately, a lot of people do understand that protecting the integrity of our electoral system is a defense of our democratic system, while enabling its corruption and abuse to keep elites in power is what is endangering it.
Not only that, but it was DEM Confederates, who created the KKK, to stop blacks, from voting. Mostly republican wise.
IT WAS DEMS who fought against giving women the right to vote.
IT WAS DEMS who fought against blacks marching for equality.
IT WAS DEMS who fought against the civil rights act..
YET THEY claim, its WE conservatives who are the racists…
He took an oath to defend the country from foreign Invasion, too, and not doing that job, either. What does he think 1 million illegals are? During a pandemic! In only 6 months!
And he’s just getting started, too.
AND that 1 million, is the ones that WE HAVE CAUGHT/who turned themselves in. JUST IMAGINE HOW MANY MORE did NOT get caught/turned in…