Republican “anti-voting laws,” President Joe Biden claimed during his demagogic speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia this afternoon, are the most “significant threat to our democracy since the Civil War.” These laws are “odious,” “pernicious,” “vicious,” and “unconscionable,” a “subversion and suppression,” the “21st-century Jim Crow,” and the sure sign of an emerging “autocracy.” Biden’s fabricated panic offers lots of space for hyperbole, but precious little room for specifics. I was prepared to fact-check Biden’s contentions about new election laws, but the president offered few details. Perhaps he comprehends that most Americans would probably find voter-integrity laws rather innocuous.
Biden must also have sensed how preposterous his hyperbole sounded, littering his speech with a bunch of “literallys” and “for reals.” None of the voting laws passed in 17 states — some drafted better than others — comes anywhere in the vicinity of “authoritarian.” To compare photo-ID laws to Jim Crow is to cheapen history. Then again, Biden, doesn’t have a problem using Goebbels’s “Big Lie” formulation, either — the kind of Nazi reference that Democrats pretend to be upset by when used by Republicans.
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