Published July 14, 2021
President Biden’s speech on Tuesday was just the latest chapter in the Democratic Party’s reckless attempt to use disputes over voting regulation to bridge its intraparty divisions. As such, it is both demagogic and dangerous.
According to Biden, the right to vote is under assault because of Republican efforts to enact election integrity measures. He called these laws and proposals “an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are.” He went on to say that the country faced its “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” In Biden’s world, there is one party that is committed to democracy — his — and one that is not.
It’s worth looking at what elections will look like under the state rules that he implicitly condemned. Georgia’s new law, for example, has attracted national attention thanks to Democratic howls and is the target of a lawsuit from Biden’s Justice Department for allegedly violating the Voting Rights Act. Given all this, one would expect that thousands — perhaps millions — of people will be denied their ability to vote in next year’s midterms.
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Henry Olsen is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
