T
he New York Times is joining left-wing activist groups to push President Biden to the left and remove the filibuster to defend “voting rights,” defined as Democratic-helpful changes to state voting laws, while emotionally labeling Republican attempts to secure the vote as “voter suppression.”
A front-page “news analysis” on Wednesday by reporters Nick Corasaniti and Reid Epstein hit Biden for inaction: “As a President Waited, States Curbed Voting.” The online headline deck: “A Voting Rights Push, as States Make Voting Harder -- President Biden says he won’t keep “quiet” any longer about protecting ballot access. But voting rights groups say he should’ve raised his voice months ago.”
That would be incorrect. It's like they missed all of Joe Biden's crazy "Jim Crow 2.0" talk in 2021. But the Times buried that stuff.
Democrat journalists write as if voting had no history before 2020, and that temporary, pandemic-inspired changes like drop boxes and mass mail-in voting are the eternal standard and are now permanent features of the landscape.
In the nine months since Republicans in Georgia muscled through a host of new voting restrictions, 18 other states have enacted 33 such laws. More than 30 states have concluded their redistricting processes, with extreme partisan gerrymandering locking in Republican control over legislatures in the electoral battlegrounds of Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas for another 10 years.
On Tuesday, President Biden urged Democrats to change the Senate’s rules to open a path -- now blocked by the threat of a Republican filibuster -- for federal legislation that would roll back some of the more egregious new voting restrictions and rein in hyperpartisan gerrymandering.
Calm persuasion, Mr. Biden said, is no longer an option for a voting law that Democrats have now been debating among themselves for nearly a year.
….
To that end, Mr. Biden called for ending the 60-vote threshold for voting rights bills, a step he opposed taking during his campaign and resisted throughout most of the first year of his presidency.
Note the dark tone the Times takes when describing benign Republican legislation in the states.
While Mr. Biden waited, however, the laws governing voting were changed in many states, and a degree of voter suppression may have become all but assured.
Confusion over changing voting laws, access, locations and timetables could cause some citizens to miss their opportunities to vote, experts say. Harsher penalties for voters and for election officials could deter people from voting for fear of prosecution over an honest mistake.
Meanwhile, Michael Shear was giving Biden cover for breaking his long-standing defense of the Senate filibuster rules in the name of Democratic partisanship in “Biden Defense of Filibuster Withers Under Partisan Rancor.”
President Biden’s decision to call for changing the Senate’s rules to pass voting rights protections was a long time coming. Perhaps -- in the view of his most disaffected supporters -- too long.
….
Those rules, he said with admiration more than a decade ago, were about “compromise and moderation,” a core part of his political identity. To support changing them would be to admit that the principles he so cherished had withered in a city now consumed by partisan rancor.
On Tuesday, he made that admission.
Evidently only Republicans are partisan.
For some presidents, choosing to support a change in Senate rules to protect voting rights might also have foreshadowed a broader awakening to the realization that the Senate was no longer a place where partisanship could be put aside for the good of the country.
That is certainly the view of many in his party….
