Ridin' Over Biden

President Biden will be in Georgia today to announce he's backing Chuck Schumer's plan to eliminate the filibuster for voting rights legislation, but the reality is that voting rights activists in the state simply don't give a single damn about what Biden has to say on the subject anymore.

SO MUCH FOR UNITY — Democratic leaders hoped to spend the week before Martin Luther King Jr. Day presenting a united front for voting rights legislation and blasting Republicans as undemocratic.

So much for that.

Multiple high-profile voting rights leaders are planning to skip President JOE BIDEN’s speech on the matter in Atlanta today, dismissing the address as too little too late. “We’re beyond speeches. We’re beyond events,” said LATOSHA BROWN, the leader of Black Voters Matter. (h/t Sam Gringlas from NPR’s Atlanta bureau)

“We do not need any more speeches, we don’t need any more platitudes,” former NAACP of Georgia President JAMES WOODALL told NYT’s Nick Corasaniti and Reid Epstein. “We don’t need any more photo ops. We need action, and that actually is in the form of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, as well as the Freedom to Vote Act — and we need that immediately.”

STACEY ABRAMS won’t be there either, citing a scheduling conflict.

At the same time, Democrats are facing growing doubts within their own ranks about nixing the filibuster to pass the voting bills. Burgess Everett reports that Sen. MARK KELLY (D-Ariz.) is undecided on what to do while Sen. JON TESTER (D-Mont.) admits he’s not crazy about a filibuster “carveout.” That’s aside from Sens. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) and KYRSTEN SINEMA’s (D-Ariz.) long-stated opposition.

WHAT BIDEN WILL SAY TODAY — Look for him to crank up the heat on the party’s voting push, calling the next few days “a turning point in this nation,” and posing a question: “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice?”

“I know where I stand,” Biden will say, according to a preview shared with Playbook. “I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies foreign and domestic. And so the question is where will the institution of [the] United States Senate stand?”

Biden, whose support for the filibuster has softened since taking office, is also expected to reiterate that he backs “changing the Senate rules to ensure it can work again … Because abuse of what was once a rarely used mechanism that is not in the Constitution has injured the body enormously, and its use to protect extreme attacks on the most basic constitutional right is abhorrent.”

A White House aide says Biden will again invoke Jan. 6 and will “describe this as one of the rare moments in a country’s history when time stops and the essential is immediately ripped away from the trivial, and that we have to ensure Jan. 6 doesn’t mark the end of democracy but the beginning of a renaissance for our democracy.”

I don't see how treating Biden like garbage helps advance voting rights. I seriously thought Stacey Abrams had better judgment than to dismiss Biden with a "scheduling conflict" when she's sure as hell going to need him later this year for her campaign rallies for Governor. 

But apparently we're right back to 2010 when "Obama failed us" after passing historic legislation.

I absolutely understand the frustration and anger. But as Jonathan Capehart points out, the actual villain remains Mitch McConnell and the other 49 GOP senators blocking any and all voting rights legislation.

The reality though is that for all the righteous anger in the country, Schumer doesn't have the votes to change the rules. There are still Democrats who refuse to play ball, and it's not just Manchin and Sinema, but Kelly and Tester and even Jeanne Shaheen.

That's not Biden's failure, but it is a failure of the Democrats.

It might be the bridge too far this time. Capehart reminds us that we still have the vote in 2022 to punish Republicans across the country, but most Americans don't care to do so, or they outright support the GOP.

As I keep telling people, the Civil Rights era was an aberration of American history, and that era is now almost certainly over.