Welcome to Byron York’s Daily Memo newsletter.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to receive the newsletter.
BIDEN’S VOTING BACKFIRE. President Joe Biden will pull off a pretty impressive trick today. He will travel to Atlanta to promote the Democrats’ voting bills. He will travel with Vice President Kamala Harris, the first person of color to serve as vice president. He will visit civil rights shrines such as the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial and Ebenezer Baptist Church. And all the while, he will be boycotted by some of the civil rights groups he has allied with in the campaign for a new Democratic voting bill.
The groups say they will not be used as “props” in a presidential visit that is no more than an “empty gesture” based on “political platitudes and repetitious, bland promises.” That is not a warm welcome.
Just look at the New York Times headline: “Voting Rights Groups Skipping Biden’s Speech in Georgia Over Inaction; Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, also will not be there, but she cited a scheduling conflict.”
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
Yes, Stacey Abrams, the Democratic hero who has taken the lead in directing baseless charges of “voter suppression” at Republicans, is boycotting Biden’s and Harris’s appearance. Yes, she is claiming a “scheduling conflict.” But really, it’s the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States. Abrams couldn’t make room in her schedule for them?
The voting groups are mad at Biden and Harris — remember, Biden gave the “voting rights” portfolio to Harris — over what they say is the administration’s “inaction” on the big bills that would federalize voting procedures on terms favorable to Democrats. Now, they say, Biden and Harris want to use them as “props” in a “political image game.”
The groups are the Black Voters Matter Fund, the Asian American Advocacy Fund, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, and the Latino group GALEO Impact Action Fund.
“Georgia voters made history and made their voices heard, overcoming obstacles, threats, and suppressive laws to deliver the White House and the U.S. Senate,” says a statement from the groups. “In return, a visit has been forced on them, requiring them to accept political platitudes and repetitious, bland promises. Such an empty gesture, without concrete action, without signs of real, tangible work is unacceptable.”
Ouch. The groups’ grievance is that while Biden and Harris ran on a platform of passing a big voting bill, once in office, they instead directed their energies to passing the president’s big spending bills. There was the $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” bill. The $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. The stalled $2 trillion Build Back Better bill. Biden, they say, has put all his effort into trying to pass those bills, leaving “voting rights” off to the side. And only now, now that Build Back Better has hit a snag, has he returned to the voting bills. And he wants to use the bills’ supporters as a backdrop for a big photo op in Georgia, which top White House aide Cedric Richmond called “the belly of the beast, or ground zero, for voter suppression, voter subversion, and obstruction.”
The underlying problem is that the voting bills are just as much in limbo as the spending bill is. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer would like to use the bills as an occasion to eliminate the legislative filibuster, but he would need the unanimous support of his own senators, which he does not have. So Biden is traveling to Atlanta to try to jump-start a bill that appears to be going nowhere.
It’s true that Biden will have civil rights leaders and members of Congress traveling with him on Air Force One to Atlanta. So it is not as if the entire civil rights world has abandoned him. But the boycott is irrefutable evidence that Democrats are divided on Biden and on his push for a voting bill. And with his spending bill in limbo, the Atlanta voting debacle is more evidence that Biden’s entire agenda has lost steam.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
