President Joe Biden on Wednesday said future elections will be “set up” in an attempt to “alter the outcome” if his signature “voting rights” legislation isn’t passed.
During his first press conference of the year, Biden was asked if he still believes “the upcoming election will be fairly conducted and its results will be legitimate” if Congress doesn’t pass his “voting rights” bill.
“It all depends on whether or not we’ll be able to make the case to the American people that some of this is being set up to try and alter the outcome of the election,” Biden responded.
“Look, maybe I’m being too much of an optimist, remember how we thought not that many people were going to show up to vote in the middle of the pandemic and we had the highest voter turnout in the history of the United States of America? Well, I think, if in fact, no matter how hard they make it for minorities to vote, I think you’re going to see them willing to stand in line and defy the attempt to keep them from being able to vote,” Biden continued.
“I think you’re going to see the people we’re trying to keep from being able to show up, showing up and making the sacrifice that needs to be made in order to change the law back to what it should be,” he added. “But it’s going to be difficult. I make no bones about that. It’s going to be difficult. But we’re not there yet. We’ve not run out of options yet and we’ll see how this moves.”
Biden’s “voting rights” legislation – The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act – seeks to federalize election laws, including making Election Day a holiday, guaranteeing early voting and mail-in ballots, weakening voter ID laws and allowing the Justice Department to intervene in state election operations.
Last week, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) slammed President Biden’s previous characterization of the “voting rights” legislation as fighting against a modern “Jim Crow era.”
“Now for those of you not familiar with the Jim Crow era, it was a terrible time. A time when we saw black men and women denied the right to vote. And when I say denied the right to vote, I’m not talking about simply saying, ‘No thank you, you cannot vote here.’ I’m saying that they were denied the right to vote by violence. Literally people being hung from trees. Losing your job if you even showed up to vote,” Scott said.
“For the president to bring up that dark and evil time in our nation’s history, and to compare that to the Georgia law – Jim Crow 2.0 as he refers to it – is ludicrous. It’s insulting,” Scott continued. “But then the president went even lower than that. To compare people who do not agree with him to the likes of Bull Connor, Jefferson Davis, or George Wallace, he didn’t just refer to Republicans as racists and traitors, he even included members of his own party who disagree with him.”
