President Joe Biden gave a fiery speech in Atlanta, Georgia, in an effort to scrap the filibuster, but it turned out to be a rather awkward brush with history and some in his own party felt that he went too far. Could it be because he attacked infamous Democrats? Mr. Biden has been on a losing streak recently. His scandalous Afghanistan withdrawal plummeted his approval rating, and his Build Back Better plan was coffined by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who broke ranks and voted no.
With Republicans working to undo Democrats’ efforts to change the voting laws to fortify the 2020 election, and a red wave in the making for 2022, Biden and his allies have been scrambling to remove any voting hurdle.
The goal was to maintain power, even if it meant getting rid of the long-held Senate filibuster. Much was at stake, and Biden held a speech with echoes from a dark past: “Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? This is the moment to decide, to defend our elections, to defend our democracy.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) expressed unease with Biden’s damning speech: “Perhaps the President went a little too far in his rhetoric. Some of us do.” Given that a mainstream senator from Biden’s own party delivered these words, they can be taken as harsh criticism.
That was Awkward
George Wallace
Was Durbin so uncomfortable because the villains in Biden’s speech were all infamous Democrats? George Wallace was the 45th governor of Alabama, sitting for four terms. He tried to become the Democratic presidential candidate three times. He was defeated by former Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 Democratic primaries, by Sen. George McGovern in 1972, and by former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in 1976. Every time, he ran on a Jim Crow segregation platform, and although he was re-elected in his home state, he failed to rise to the top in the Democratic Party.
Bull Connor started his career as a Democrat in 1934 in the Alabama House of Representatives. By 1961, he won landslide re-election to a sixth term as Commissioner for Public Safety in Birmingham. Historians recognize that he used his role as Commissioner to allow the Ku Klux Klan free rein to beat the civil rights activists called Freedom Riders for 15 minutes without police intervention. The Ku Klux Klan was a paramilitary organization created by the Democrats in 1865.
Before the civil war, Jefferson Davis represented Mississippi in the United States House of Representatives and Senate. In 1853, Davis served as Secretary of War under the Democratic President Franklin Pierce, who saw the slavery abolition movement as the greatest threat to American unity. It was under Pierce’s presidency that the Republican Party was founded to combat slavery. In 1861, Davis became President of the Confederate States of America. The rest, as they say, is history.
Embarrassing Past
For decades, the Democrats have been covering up the embarrassing fact that their party was the party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow. For reasons unknown, Republicans have allowed their opponents to invert history. In his speech to abolish the filibuster, Biden came uncomfortably close to bringing public attention to historical facts Democrats do not want widely known. Is it any wonder Durbin thought he “went too far?”
~ Read more from Caroline Adana.
