Vote Out

President Biden and the Democrats are likely to face a final defeat of the voting-rights legislation in the Senate tomorrow, and all indications are that Biden's incendiary speech in Atlanta about the need to pass the legislation satisfied few people - and those few are in no position to do anything about it.

The speech was primarily aimed at Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to get them to change their minds about offering a carve-out for the filibuster to allow these bills to pass, or at least reform the filibuster to force senators who use the practice to talk for hours rather than just put a block on it.  They're not budging.  Biden couldn't even satisfy voting rights activists with his speech because he didn't have a plan to back up his efforts to get the legislation passed - he was winging it, improvising as he went along.  All Biden did was offend the two senators in question for suggestion comparison  between them and Jefferson Davis or George Wallace, and his efforts to change their minds in private conversations yielded nothing.

So what's left?  Just what Biden's efforts yielded.  Nothing.  Democrats will try to push the legislation and get nowhere due to Republican opposition, and when they try to make an issue out of voting rights in the midterm election campaigns, they'll realize too late that inflation and possibly the pandemic will continue to be he dominating issues of 2022 - and the country can't seem to get beyond either.  Look for the Republicans to take over both houses of Congress in the midterms and see them investigate Biden all the way through 2023 and 2024 while voting rights are chipped away even more in the states - and by the way, the voting-rights legislation the Democrats have offered does little if anything to regulate the counting of the votes, and the Republicans will likely use laws allowing them to nullify results in different states  to win back the White House . . . possibly with Trump at the head of the ticket. 

And then 45 will become 47 when he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025, which will be the third Monday in January that year.  That is, Martin Luther King Day.

Oh, the irony!

Progressives will not give President Biden any credit for trying as hard as he could to get voting-rights legislation passed.  Because progressives pretty much follow Yoda's maxim: Do or don't do.  There is no "try."