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Republicans appear to have discovered a brand new speaking level to justify blocking the voter protections Democrats are attempting to move this month: Evaluating Joe Biden to Donald Trump. “President Biden goes down the identical tragic highway taken by President Trump, casting doubt on the reliability of American elections,” Utah Republican Mitt Romney said on the Senate flooring Tuesday, following the president’s address urging lawmakers to move voting rights laws. “This can be a unhappy, unhappy day.”
“I anticipated extra of President Biden, who got here into workplace with the acknowledged aim of bringing the nation collectively,” Romney added.
The analogy between Biden and his occasion, who search to defend voting rights, and Trump, who’s on a campaign to undermine them, is, after all, exceedingly disingenuous. Nevertheless it seems to be an interesting line of assault for Republicans equivalent to Romney, who received’t go as far as to parrot Trump’s easily-disproved conspiracy theories, however who nonetheless search to capitalize on the voting restrictions which have grown out of them. A number of GOP lawmakers have not too long ago trotted out the same argument, together with Senate Majority Chief Mitch McConnell, who has additionally damaged with Trump over his election fraud claims. “These modifications wouldn’t bolster religion in our democracy or our establishments,” McConnell mentioned in a recent floor speech, citing the report turnout in 2020 as proof no voter protections are wanted forward of upcoming elections. “It could do the other. It could be a civic wrecking ball.”
Whereas it’s true that the final election was not “rigged” or rife with “fraud,” as Trump continues to say, the panorama for voters has change into extra unsure since then: Republican-controlled legislatures throughout the nation have enacted legal guidelines making it harder to solid ballots, proponents of Trump’s Huge Lie are vying for jobs overseeing the election course of, and the previous president has continued to undermine his base’s religion within the system. Republicans are, in brief, making an attempt to undo protections that helped make the final cycle so safe.
Biden calling out that underhanded marketing campaign and urgent his occasion to combat again shouldn’t be an assault on the democratic course of — it’s a protection of it. “The battle for the soul of America shouldn’t be over,” the president said in Atlanta on Tuesday. “We should stand sturdy and stand collectively to verify January sixth marks not the top of democracy however the starting of a renaissance of our democracy.”
However the Republicans who’ve pledged to hinder him at each flip, who’re utilizing the filibuster to forestall voting rights laws from even being debated, and who’ve enabled or actively participated in Trump’s assaults on democracy, proceed to accuse Biden of being divisive. McConnell on Wednesday went as far as to describe his Atlanta speech as “profoundly unpresidential.”
“The president’s rant yesterday was incoherent, incorrect, and beneath his workplace,” McConnell mentioned. “A president shouting that 52 senators and tens of millions of Individuals are racist except he will get no matter he desires is proving precisely why the framers constructed the Senate to test his energy.”
Nevertheless it’s not “demagoguery” to face as much as a demagogue, who nonetheless refuses to acknowledge that he misplaced his reelection bid and has attacked anybody who suggests in any other case. McConnell and Romney have repeatedly shot down Trump’s Huge Lie, together with in current days, as Trump bashed Republican Senator Mike Rounds for merely acknowledging that “we didn’t win the presidency.” However additionally they wish to have it each methods, distracting from the methods wherein their occasion has saved that lie alive and used it for political acquire.
“It’s simply unbelievably wonderful that he would equate Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” Senate Majority Chief Chuck Schumer mentioned of Romney in an MSNBC interview Wednesday. “It’s simply an absurdity, and Mitt Romney is aware of that. Mitt Romney is aware of that. He is aware of that Joe Biden and Donald Trump should not the identical…All of them gaslight. They are saying, ‘Oh, it’s Democrats who’re doing the Huge Lie.’ We’re not doing any lies. Each single factor we now have pointed to that state legislatures are doing is going on and occurring proper now.”
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