When it comes to the Biden-Harris administration demonizing Republicans while claiming to stand for unity, enough is enough — and enough is already far, far too much.
The two defamation artists couldn’t stop after President Joe Biden called Republican adversaries “semi-fascists” and made one of the nastiest presidential “addresses” in history. Vice President Kamala Harris followed with a Saturday speech to the Democratic National Committee that repeatedly referred to elected Republican leaders and the Supreme Court not just as wrong, but as “extremists” who “restrict and systematically attempt to take away freedoms” and want to “dismantle our democracy.”
Maybe it’s not just exaggeration and calumny. Maybe it’s psychological projection. In the very same speech, Harris promised that if the Democrats take control of both chambers of Congress after November’s elections, they will take several steps that, if not actually “dismantling” democracy, certainly undermine constitutional practice and tradition.
Harris said Democrats once and for all would end the Senate filibuster that allows a determined minority of 41 of 100 senators to extend debate and stop the passage of controversial legislation. This would upend more than 200 years of tradition of protecting minority prerogatives and encouraging compromise. As it is, it is six votes easier to send a filibuster than it was less than a half-century ago. While various filibuster reforms might be worthy of discussion, the Biden-Harris idea of completely ending filibusters is exactly what Biden and Harris accuse Republicans of being: radical.
Harris also promised, or threatened, that if the Democrats are fully in control, they will eliminate all state discretion in handling abortion by passing a national law allowing abortion essentially on demand everywhere, right up until birth. That’s as extremist as can be imagined, as it runs completely counter to public opinion. Even if slim majorities don’t want abortion entirely banned, polls for 50 years consistently have shown that the majority of people support significant restrictions on abortion. In fact, several surveys this year have found that as many as 72% support banning it after 15 weeks of pregnancy or sooner.
Harris would insist that Mormons in Utah and traditionalist Baptists and Evangelicals in, say, Alabama should not be able to restrict abortion at all. That’s radical.
Finally, Harris said the Democrats would ram through a major national voting policy law, again completely obliterating local options and tradition, thus running counter to the Constitution’s establishment of “federalism” that encourages states and communities to govern themselves to as great an extent as possible.
Worse, the nationalization they envision is an open invitation to voting fraud or error and to major problems in keeping voter lists up-to-date. As voting expert Hans von Spakovsky has explained, the Democratic legislation at issue would cause all sorts of trouble. Local governments would need to petition the national Department of Justice, for example, just to move a polling site from a school gymnasium to its auditorium, with the Washington bureaucrats under no obligation to answer in a timely fashion. All sorts of reasonable state measures for voter integrity would be jettisoned, while ballots might be “automatically” mailed out even to voters who don’t specifically request them.
Meanwhile, rather than being forbidden from drawing district lines specifically for racial reasons except in very narrow circumstances, the Democrats’ bill (quoting von Spakovsky) would “force racial gerrymandering [and] make race the predominant factor in the election process.”
Just what this nation doesn’t need: more efforts to divide us by race.
In all, while Biden and Harris slander Republicans with abandon, they are the ones whose policies we should fear. They aren’t physicians, but they should heal themselves.
