Details, details

You-know-who lives there

“Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” —the president of the United States, last week, in Atlanta

PLEASE forgive your friendly editorial column if the first few paragraphs of this piece read like a car manual. But the details are important. And we’ll refrain from (much) opinion for only a few lines. Until we get to the president’s words above.

Now then . . . .

According to the papers, there are two voting rights bills in the Washington mix these overheated days. First, and most famously, there is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the late Georgia congressman and civil rights leader.

Then there is the much bigger 600-page Freedom to

Vote Act. Democratic leaders want both of these to be considered and passed. And if the filibuster has to go to complete the task(s), then so be it.

Because last year, some state legislatures began passing changes to their particular states’ election laws. This might have been pushback after the pandemic nudged other states to make voting easier by allowing more votes by mail, more ballot drop-off spots, longer early voting, etc. The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact says the Freedom to Vote Act would “bring more uniformity to voting” in these new ways. Another way to put it: The bill would federalize elections, when that has always been a state responsibility.

And there are more controversial parts of this bill. Such as automatic voter registration at the DMV, same-day registration, and requiring states to count absentee ballots received a week after the election (!) as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. Talk about delaying the results.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is a different thing.

A bit of history may be needed here: The 1965 Voting Rights Act required certain states or jurisdictions to get “pre-clearance” from the feds before changing voting laws and redistricting maps. These certain states, you might imagine, were mostly those Southern states that had discriminated against minority groups in the past. And in 1965, you can bet this sort of thing was needed.

The courts, however, have recently ruled against so-called Section 5 of the 1965 act, and it can be argued that sort of thing is outdated.

All of this can be debated. All of this is being debated. All of this should be debated.

But if you are somebody who believes that ballots ought to be counted on Election Day . . . . If you are the sort of person who would suspicion same-day registration . . . . If you believe, maybe only in private, that pre-clearance should apply to all states or none of them . . . .

Are you really taking the side of Bull Connor and George Wallace?

There is plenty of argument to go around. You may agree with Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who says the John Lewis Act would “ensure that the Voting Rights Act [of 1965] continues to have the effect long intended: to protect the right to vote.” Or you may agree with Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, who says the law is unnecessary because “it’s against the law to discriminate in voting on the basis of race already.”

You may agree with those who say voting should be as easy as, or even easier than, cashing a check—because it’s that important. You may agree with the other side, which often says voting should be harder than cashing a check—because it’s that important.

We can debate the several court rulings: Brnovich v. DNC, or Shelby v. Holder, or even older cases.

But after all the legal and logical and rhetorical questions are sufficiently pondered, if you end up on one side rather than the other, should you really be cast as a 2022 version of Bull Connor or George Wallace?

This is very much what the president insists. In shouts. While pointing his finger. And grimacing in the Atlanta sun. It was not his finest moment.

WE’VE SAID it before: The current president seems under the impression that he’ll be taken more seriously if he acts like he’s angry. This is a new Joe Biden. Some of us are old enough to remember when the knock on Joe Biden was that he wasn’t serious enough. (Remember his laughing through the vice presidential debate with Paul Ryan in 2012?)

If this is the president’s thinking, he’s getting bad advice. Some of us watched his Atlanta speech this past week and had to grimace ourselves. Somebody on CNN said West Virginia’s senator Joe Manchin is prickly enough without being compared to segregationists. And being labeled so isn’t about to get him on board. We’d add it might not bring non-Democrats on board, either. Trust us.

Maybe a fit of anger was appropriate during the Jan. 6 anniversary speech. And maybe a fit of anger will be appropriate for some occasion tomorrow. But this can’t work every single time, can it?

We have a hard time seeing a Reagan, or a Clinton, or an Obama, or either Bush, or any happy warrior president giving the kind of speech we saw in Atlanta.

Americans can have these debates. And they can have them without charging each other with standing with unreconstructed Confederates from the bad old days. The details of these pieces of legislation don’t lend themselves to Jim Crow exactly.

Has the president been told that?