President Joe Biden this week made misleading claims regarding voter suppression, just one year after being part of the country’s greatest voter turnout in recent history in 2020. 66% of registered American voters came out to vote in the 2020 election between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden. That came after decades of presidential voter turnout hovering the 50% to 55% turnout dating back to 1972.
During a speech last Tuesday, Biden mentioned voter suppression six times, even saying that the Republican party is trying to suppress black votes.
“Black Americans were denied full citizenship and voting rights until 1965. Women were denied the right to vote until just 100 years ago. The United States Supreme Court, in recent years, has weakened the Voting Rights Act. And now the defeated former president and his supporters use the Big Lie about the 2020 election to fuel torrent and torment and anti-voting laws — new laws designed to suppress your vote, to subvert our elections,” the President said.
Biden also continued a bizarre narrative that America’s voting laws are similar to Jim Crow laws during America’s Democrat-led segregationist era.
“Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s no longer about who gets to vote; it’s about making it harder to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all,” Biden added.
Now, Biden says, the only way to save Democracy is to pass the Democrat’s voting rights bill which seeks to codify many of the pandemic rules added to allow for more voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.
” Pass the Freedom to Vote Act. (Applause.) Pass it now — (applause) — which would prevent voter suppression so that here in Georgia there’s full access to voting by mail, there are enough drop boxes during enough hours so that you can bring food and water as well to people waiting in line,” he said.
But, Biden will not have the votes in the Senate to move the bill to his desk as 52 U.S. Senators, including two from his own party, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have publicly opposed the bill.
In return, Democrats, including Bernie Sanders have blamed the two Democrats for opposing the bill, falsely claiming their two votes are the reason for the bill’s defeat. It takes a majority of the 100 person Senate to pass the bill and as of today, only 48 U.S. Senators have indicated their support.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday name-checked Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (W.Va.) as a months-long push to change the legislative filibuster and pass voting rights legislation is poised to come to a head this week.
Sanders, in a tweet, asked whether all 50 Democrats will support changing the filibuster, which requires 60 votes for most legislation to advance in the Senate, noting that it is the one vote that really matters. To change the rules without GOP support, Democrats will need total unity from their caucus.
“As the voting rights bill finally comes to the floor of the Senate, there is only one vote which will really matter. Will 50 Democrats vote to override the filibuster, protect American democracy and pass the bill, or will Manchin and Sinema vote with the GOP and let the bill die?” Sanders said.