AIMING FOR 200 MILLION
Biden doubles vaccination goal
At his first news conference, the president doubled his original goal on COVID-19 vaccines by pledging that the nation will administer 200 million doses by the end of his first 100 days in office.
President Joe Biden condemned the nationwide effort by Republicans to make it harder for people to vote as “sick,” “un-American” and worse than the racist Jim Crow laws from the nation’s past.
In a news conference Thursday, Biden decried efforts in Republican-controlled states to reduce voter participation. Florida is one of those states.
Biden said he thinks the efforts can be stopped. “I am convinced that we will be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. I mean this is gigantic what they are trying to do, and it cannot be sustained.”
Jim Crow laws were enacted in southern states to disenfranchise Black voters after the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Jim Crow was outlawed by the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In the months since Biden won the 2020 election, many Republican leaders across the country have echoed former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voting irregularities.
There isn’t evidence the presidential election was stolen. And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans bragged about how smoothly voting went last year.
Still, in state after state, including Florida, lawmakers are working on efforts they are promoting as increasing voting security. Taken together, Democrats, advocacy groups and elections experts warn that the changes would have a disproportionate impact on Black, Hispanic and lower income voters.
Biden said he was worried about “how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick.”
The president ticked off some of the proposed limitations: “Deciding in some states that you cannot bring water to people standing in line waiting to vote. Deciding that you are going to end voting at 5 o’clock, when working people are just getting off work” and making it harder to receive and cast mail ballots.
Legislation pending in Florida would prohibit distribution of water to voters waiting in lines who are within 150 feet of polling places. Campaigning is already illegal in the 150-foot zone, and it’s campaign workers who often distribute water to thirsty voters waiting to get into polling places.
Florida proposals wouldn’t impose an early poll closing. But mail balloting would be made more difficult under measures moving forward in the Florida House and Senate.
Last month, state Sen. Gary Farmer, a Broward Democrat who serves as his party’s leader in the Florida Senate called the efforts “nothing short of a massive voter suppression campaign, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Jim Crow days.” Earlier this month, Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said provisions of the legislation in the Florida Senate as “massive voter suppression.”
But state Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, a member of the House Public Integrity & Elections Committee, said such criticisms are shallow and predictable. “When Democrats scream ‘voter suppression,’ it is mostly an intellectually dishonest argument.”
Biden said Republican voters — not the elected Republicans driving the issue — agree that attempting to restrict voting is “reprehensible.”
Working with Congress, Biden said, “I am going to do everything in my power” to prevent the Republican proposals from going into effect.
Congressional Democrats hope to do that by passing comprehensive voting rights legislation. In an email to supporters on Saturday, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, R-Palm City, labeled the federal proposal an “all-out assault on our elections from partisan Democrats in Washington.”
But that would require eliminating or ending the Senate filibuster rule, which effectively means legislation requires 60 votes. That means 10 Republican votes would be required.
The president said there are other steps, besides legislation, that could thwart the Republican moves but he declined Thursday “to lay out a strategy in front of the whole world.”