President Joe Biden recently gave a fiery speech pushing for the voting rights bill that just passed the house to be also be passed by the Senate, which would require changing the rules on the filibuster. His speech was strong, he invoked the civil rights movement and compared conservative resistance to the bill to the segregationists of old. But some civil rights leaders refused to attend the speech, thinking that Biden had ignored their concerns for too long, or that the bill didn't go far enough. Meanwhile, moderates and political pundits wondered why he bothered to give the speech at all, given that both Senator Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have said that they oppose changing the filibuster rule, dooming the bill. Yes, for all its powerful rhetoric, Biden's speech feels in many ways like the first year of his presidency: nice ideas, but impossible to get done in the current political climate.
Biden has been president for almost exactly one year, and right now he seems mired in inability and incompetence. It's a shame, because he started off well: he pushed for vaccinations, passed a stimulus bill, and stood ready to reap the political rewards of a recovering economy. Instead, he has run into a number of problems: two different variants of the virus and a stubbornly vaccine resistant populace (America currently stands at 63% vaccinated, the lowest of any industrialized nation according to the New York Times), inflation caused by a supply chain slowdown, and Manchin and Sinema's willingness to stab him in the back and kill his agenda in the Senate. And while he has been able to appoint numerous judges and pass an infrastructure bill recently, Manchin's killing of the Build Back Better Bill and his and Sinema's killing of the voting rights bill have left Biden, who ran as a former Senator who knew how to get things passed, look weak.
Things have looked so bad for Biden that a recent polling memo release attacked a poll that showed his approval rating at 33%, saying that it was really more like 43%. Hardly something to brag about!
The depressing reality of this is that the Republican party has been swarming election boards in swing states with Trump loyalists who believe his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Once in power, these board members very well may find ways to reject vote counts in future elections. Meaning that if Trump were to run again in 2024, state election boards may be able to swing votes in his direction through creative counting and discounting of the votes. In other words, they've moved beyond voter repression into throwing out votes after they have been cast. This kind of despicable, undemocratic election rigging is a horrifying possibility, and so far the Democratic party has done little to stop it.
Things get even worse when you consider the now very likely possibility of the Republican party retaking both the house and the senate next year. Believe me, if Manchin and Sinema have been driving you crazy, wait until people like Margery Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz are on investigative committees in the house.
Which brings us back to Biden's voting rights speech; while it may seem to be an empty gesture, one thing it may help do is fire up the base, and let African American voters know that Biden has their back, even if congress doesn't. This could lead to more donations and volunteering for the party in the upcoming midterm elections. Will this be enough to hold a Republican takeover in congress? Sadly, I doubt it. The only thing that could help the Democrats this year is if the Supreme Court overturns Roe Vs Wade, which could result in the Republican party losing the all important white suburban women vote that they've had for years. While I certainly don't want Roe Vs Wade overturned, that could be the one thing that saves both the Democrats and democracy itself. We'll see.
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