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Joe Biden, who has been criticized for not using his “intimidating chair” to defend voting rights, is expected to deliver an aggressive denunciation of Donald Trump’s “big lie” on a stolen election on Tuesday.
After months of acrimony with his predecessor in a bid to lower the political temperature, Biden will argue that Trump’s false conspiracy theories led to the Jan.6 insurgency and a wave of electoral restrictions, the House said. White.
“He will set out the moral reasons why denying the right to vote is a form of repression and a form of silencing,” Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, told reporters on Monday.
“And he will redouble his commitment to use all the tools at his disposal to continue to fight to protect the fundamental right of Americans to vote against the onslaught of voter suppression laws, based on a dangerous conspiracy theory and discredited which resulted in an attack on our Capitol. “
Biden to deliver the speech in Philadelphia, symbolically important as the cradle of American democracy; a democracy now seen to be under existential threat from many Republican state legislatures passing voter suppression bills.
Psaki continued, “He will call – the biggest irony of the ‘big lie’ is that no election in our history has reached such a high standard, with over 80 judges, including those appointed by his predecessor, rejecting all of them. challenges.
“He will also denounce efforts to deny the right to vote of authoritarians and anti-Americans, and will challenge the idea that politicians should be allowed to choose their voters or overthrow our system by replacing election officials. independent by partisan authorities. “
Biden will stress the “need to work with civil rights organizations to build as broad a system of voter participation and education as possible in order to overcome the worst challenge for our democracy since the civil war,” the door added. -speak.
Trump’s bogus election fraud claim last year was dismissed as baseless by his own attorney general, William Barr, as well as dozens of judges and state election officials. Still, the ex-president pushed him repeatedly, and again on Sunday during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas. He continues to thrive in the right-wing media and among his base of support.
It will be Biden’s first major speech on voting rights since the For the People Act, a sweeping reform to consolidate democracy, stuck in the Senate when Republicans filibustered, and since the Supreme Court upheld restrictive voting rules in Arizona.
The president, who met with civil rights leaders at the White House last Thursday, was condemned for not speaking out more forcefully to support the For the People Act or sounding the alarm about the dangers to it. right to vote.
Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the popular movement Indivisible, tweeted last week: “We all worked hard to elect Biden, and I desperately want him to succeed. But we didn’t put him in the game just to see him sit on the sidelines. We need our star player on the pitch.
Progressives have urged Biden and moderate Democrats to support changing or abolishing filibuster, which requires 60 votes for legislation to move forward; the Senate is currently split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. James Clyburn, a Democratic congressman and staunch ally of Biden, has proposed a filibuster exemption for voting rights.
But Psaki told reporters: “Filibuster is a tool of the legislative process – an important tool – that deserves debate, but the decision to make changes will be made by members of the Senate, not by this president or any other president, frankly, to move forward. And that requires every Democrat to support the changes.
“Now I’m not here to give you a whip tally, but that’s not where the support is right now. Thus, the President’s point of view continues to be aligned with what he has said in the past, namely that he did not support the elimination of filibuster because it was used, as often, the other way around.
Regarding the exemption from voting rights, Psaki said: “We don’t have a new position on this either.”
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