Most Americans, even those who voted for him, would recognize that Joe Biden is no intellectual. A man of at best middling intelligence, his success as a politician has been built
on bombast and cagey moves to satisfy the various special interests that make up the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.
But in Philadelphia Joe Biden delivered one of the most intellectually powerful presidential speeches of this political cycle – and conservatives should take heed.
In what our friend Catherine Mortensen of Americans for Limited Government characterized as a rambling, at times inaudible, speech, Biden claimed the Jan. 6 capitol rioters pose a greater threat to our nation that the Confederate forces of the Civil War, because at least they “didn’t breach the Capitol.”
This was not the bombastic Joe Biden we’ve known of old. As Ms. Mortensen pointed out, what Biden was really doing was laying out an intellectual framework for using the power of the federal government to shut down his political opposition.
Biden, noted Ms. Mortensen, continued to compare voter ID laws and other election integrity measures “poll taxes and the Ku Klux Klan campaigns of violence and terror that lasted into the fifties and sixties.
“We also have to be clear-eyed about the obstruction we face. Legislation is one tool but not the only tool, and it’s not the only measure of our obligation to defend democracy today. For example, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the United States Department of Justice is going to be using its authorities to challenge the onslaught of state laws undermining voting rights in old and new ways.
“The focus will be on dismantling racially discriminating laws like Georgia’s vicious anti-voting laws. The Department of Justice will do so for the voting rights division that my request is doubling in size and enforcement status.”
Biden further denounced efforts to allow poll watchers from both political parties to observe ballot counting as an attempt by “partisan poll watchers to intimidate voters and poll workers.”
“They want voters to… wonder whose watching them and intimidating them, to wait longer to vote, to drive a hell of a long way to get to vote. They want to make it hard and inconvenient. They hope people don’t vote at all. That’s what this is about.”
And as Ms. Mortensen noted, he then proceeded to bring out the tired line about GOP voter integrity measures being “21st century Jim Crow laws.”
But here’s the key: Biden went on to say that the federal government must act now to prevent voter suppression in the mid-term elections.
“No matter what, you can never stop the American people from voting. They will decide. The power must always be with the people,” Biden explained attempting to take up the mantle of populism, even though as Ms. Mortensen pointed out, Biden is the very embodiment of government elite that the American people distrust.
You can read Catherine Mortensen’s entire piece through this link and it is well worth it.
Then he went on to use bombastic language more suited for a military campaign than a speech about voting rights.
“There’s an unfolding assault taking place in America today, 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, who we are as Americans. Make no mistake, bullies and merchants of fear, and peddlers of lies of threaten the foundation of our country.
“I never thought in my entire career I’d have to say it, but I swore an oath to god — an oath to you, to God to protect and preserve the Constitution and that’s an oath to forms a sacred trust to defend all Americans from threats both foreign and domestic.
“The assault on free and fair elections is just such a threat literally. We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. This is not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. Confederates back then never breached the capitol as insurrectionists did on January the 6th. I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying this because you should be alarmed,” concluded the President.
If we dissect what Joe Biden said in Philadelphia each item is a justification for federal intervention to bend elections to favor Democrats or – even more worryingly – a justification for using the federal government to attack and punish anyone who disagrees with Joe Biden.
Now, we are not saying this to alarm you. We are saying this because you should be alarmed. You will see these justifications trotted out again and again between now and Election Day 2022, and every time you see one of them, it will be accompanied by a lawsuit to undermine election integrity or an arrest to subvert your freedom of speech.
Biden Philadelphia Speech
January 6 riot
Civil War
Voter ID laws
Voting rights
Jim Crow
Attorney General Merrick Garland
Department of Justice
Voter suppression
Election integrity
freedom of speech