Over years of following American politics, I'd come to regard Joe Biden as harmless — a backslapper without strong conviction, given to exaggeration and the occasional outright lie, but no worse than average for a career politician and no threat to the republic. Lately I've been wondering if I overestimated him.
His remarks on Jan. 11 settle the matter. His speech on election law was Trump-level demagoguery, the opposite of what the country needs and should expect of its president.
Biden is pressing for passage of two voting-reform laws. The first — the Freedom to Vote Act — is a compendium of measures to make voting easier. The other — the John Lewis Act — seeks among other things to restore requirements on some states to get federal permission for changes in their voting rules.
Together, they constitute a strong exertion of federal authority over states' ability to conduct elections. Set aside what the Constitution may or may not require in that regard: Since the elections in question are federal, I see no principled objection. Voting should be as easy as possible, and to the naive observer, it isn't obvious why the rules should vary state by state.
Yet there's a vast difference between advocating for these bills and equating opposition to them as support for "Jim Crow 2.0" and "the end of democracy." That is exactly what Biden did. It was hyperbole verging on hysteria.
The fate of the republic does not rest on what form of ID is required of people turning up at polling places. Nor does it depend on whether snacks can be served to voters in line, registration is automatic, Election Day is a national holiday or states offer 15 consecutive days of early voting. These and countless other minutiae vary widely across the democratic world.
In contrast, the fate of the republic might indeed depend on whether the losing side accepts the election result as legitimate. In his response to the 2020 election, Trump overthrew that presumption, and was rightly slammed for it. Now Biden, who promised to unite the nation and repair the damage Trump has wrought, is doing just the same.
If the reform bills fail to pass — as seems all but certain, since the Democrats lack a sufficient majority in the Senate and two of their senators are opposed to suspending the filibuster — Biden's rhetoric will have laid the groundwork for a truly chilling scenario: When Democrats next lose an election, they will view the result as illegitimate. In a country as closely and bitterly divided as the U.S., it's hard to think of a more toxic intervention.
