A frustrated President Abraham Lincoln once snidely commented on Gen. George B. McClellan’s reluctance to engage Confederate forces massed near Washington: “If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time.”
One hundred fifty-nine years later, President Joe Biden declared the G.O.P.’s passage of laws restricting access to voting the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” The question is, Is Biden up to engaging in that fight? Or does he wish to be remembered like McClellan?
On Thursday, a group of 150 civil rights groups delivered a letter to Biden insisting he bring to bear the clout of the presidency to pass both the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act “by whatever means necessary.”
To date, Biden seems to believe gentle nudging, appeals to bipartisanship, and magical thinking will do it somehow. Those on the pointy end of about 30 new laws across the country that restrict ballot access have a very different perspective (New York Times):
Mr. Biden, a veteran of the Senate who for decades has believed in negotiating on the particulars of voting rights legislation, has faced calls to push Democratic senators to eliminate the filibuster, which would allow the two major voting bills proposed by the party to pass with a simple majority. The president and his advisers have repeatedly pointed out that he does not have the votes within his own party to pass federal voting legislation, and does not have the power to unilaterally roll back the filibuster even if he supported doing so.
But voting rights groups say that Mr. Biden is not expending sufficient political capital or using the full force of his bully pulpit to persuade Congress. They point to the contrast between his soaring language — “Jim Crow on steroids,” he has called the G.O.P. voting laws — and his opposition to abolishing the Senate filibuster.
“As you noted in your speech, our democracy is in peril,” the groups said in their letter. “We certainly cannot allow an arcane Senate procedural rule to derail efforts that a majority of Americans support.”
The Biden administration, sources say, believes Democrats can out-organize voter suppression. And perhaps that’s true. But it also echoes the same Beltway myopia that won Barack Obama a second term while losing Democrats 948 state legislative seats across the country (Ballotpedia):
Twenty-nine state legislative chambers in 19 states flipped from Democratic to Republican control compared to the start of Obama’s presidency. In ten states these flips resulted in the creation of Republican trifectas, where Republicans controlled both chambers as well as the governorship.
A senior adviser to Biden, Cedric Richmond, believes advocates have misinterpreted the administration’s position. The New York Times again:
“I think it’s very clear what he said,” Mr. Richmond said of the president’s speech in Philadelphia. “Which is: We’re going to have to meet this challenge in the courts, in the halls of Congress and in the streets.”
But in interviews, more than 20 civil rights leaders and voting rights advocates said that while they believed in Mr. Biden’s conviction to protect the right to vote, they thought his call for a “new coalition” of Americans to take up the issue was not what they needed from the White House.
Some advocates found this approach — the idea that the vaunted voter registration, education and get-out-the-vote efforts that helped propel Mr. Biden to victory could be used against G.O.P. voting laws — naïve at best, signaling that the White House viewed the issue as simply an election challenge, rather than a moral threat to broad civil rights progress.
The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, founder of the Poor People’s Campaign, wants to see Biden meet diverse people in Texas, In Arizona, and in West Virginia “to put a face on this issue.”
Nsé Ufot, the executive director of the New Georgia Project, tells the Times the administration’s talk of a “new coalition” isn’t enough. “And now we need them to do their jobs. I can’t write legislation. I can’t whip votes. I don’t have 47 years in that body, in the United States Senate. I’m not the president of that body. But they are.”
The White House needs to put its back into this effort. If President Biden does not want to use his bully pulpit, might they borrow it for a time?