Biden Faces Backlash Over ‘Voting Rights’ Speech

It’s Thursday, January 13th, and this is your Morning Wire. Listen to the full podcast:

1) Biden Faces Backlash Over ‘Voting Rights’ Speech

The Topline: On Tuesday, President Joe Biden delivered a speech calling on Congress to overhaul the nation’s election laws by passing the Democrats’ “Freedom To Vote Act.”

Quote Of The Day: “So I ask every elected official in America: how do you want to be remembered? …Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?… Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? This is the moment to decide…”

– President Joe Biden

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The Speech

President Biden framed the passage of the Democrats’ Freedom To Vote Act as a fight between “democracy and autocracy.” The address followed his January 6th address where he implied that Republican efforts to pass election integrity laws were an attack on democracy, and more specifically, the rights of African American voters. 

Criticism

Critics were quick to point out that when Biden first ran for president in 1987, he bragged to voters in the south that segregationist Governor George Wallace once praised him as an outstanding senator.

Biden also implied he was arrested during the Civil Rights movement, but fact-checkers say there’s no record of any such arrest happening, and he never mentioned it in his autobiography. He also received criticism for using the term “coup attempt” to describe the January 6th riot, and compared Georgia’s recent election integrity bill to the Jim Crow era South. 

Many social justice activists are criticizing Biden for failing to take action on voting legislation during his first year in office. 

While some leading Georgia Democrats were present, Stacey Abrams, who has become the face of the Democrats’ election overhaul push, was not. 

The Black Voters Matter Fund, along with several other liberal groups, boycotted the event, saying it was nothing more than a “photo op” for President Biden.

The Bill

While voters in each state are currently allowed to decide their state’s election process, the main goal of the Democrats’ bill is to federalize the election process, allowing Congress to decide election laws for all 50 states at once. 

Democrats are framing the bill as part of a larger social justice fight. They say the new law is a response to Republican efforts to “suppress black voters” by requiring them to get IDs and standardizing voting hours. Republicans argue the bill would weaken election integrity at a time when millions of voters have lost faith in the process. They also point out how the vast majority of African Americans support Voter ID laws. 

At the moment, the bill is not expected to pass. Democrats need 60 votes to secure passage, and there is a 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans. 

The Filibuster: 

In response, President Biden is renewing calls to abolish the filibuster in the Senate. If that happens, Democrats would essentially be able to pass any legislation. President Biden says the filibuster is anti-democratic, but Republicans have pointed out how as recently as 2005, he said any effort to abolish the filibuster was a “power grab” that would “eviscerate the Senate.” Democrats have used the filibuster hundreds of times in the last two years.

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2) Biden Policies Added Zero Jobs To Economy

The Topline: President Joe Biden has said he’s created more jobs than any president in the last 40 years, but according to a new analysis of his economic record, the actual number of jobs his policies created may be zero.

The Numbers

The U.S. economy added 6.4 million jobs last year, but economists say the economy would produce that many jobs if Biden had done nothing.

Last February, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the U.S. economy would add an average of 521,000 jobs a month between the fourth quarter of 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2021, which amounts to 6,252,000 jobs.

It’s now clear that the economy added 6,116,000 jobs during that time. Last week, President Biden said the credit belonged to his $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, the American Rescue Plan, but he and congressional Democrats promised that if Congress passed his economic measures, they would produce millions more jobs. 

Last March, while promoting the “American Rescue Plan,” Biden said his plan would create 7 million new jobs. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi later changed that projection to 4 million new jobs. In November, Vice President Kamala Harris promised the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework would create millions more jobs, yet.

The administration promised several million jobs in addition to the 6 million the economy produced. At a minimum, the economy should have produced 10-and-a-quarter million jobs last year. However, the economy produced 136,000 fewer jobs than the CBO forecast without Biden’s $3.1 trillion in new government