Hi’.
Ross Douthat has the best opinion pieces on the New York Times, in that they are dumpster fires (NYT). They give the occasion for anti-trumpists to vent about how horrible it is that:
- The president who told and got progressives to cave on a bill is “a progressive puppet”
- The president who united the Democratic Party is “not a unifier”
- The president who compromised on everything and beyond is “partisan”
- The voting rights bill written by Manchin and negotiated with Republicans is “too progressive”
And I could go on, but I think I have found possibly the most absurd comment of them all. And you will forgive the foreigner I am for not even bothering with Douthat’s opinion itself, he lost me by the first sentence.
So, our winner of the day is sigmundk, from Montana (I added the bold):
Unfortunately, I agree with Mr. Douthat. When Pres. Biden comes back to the middle and proposes a voting rights bill that includes a free voting rights id card, then he will get somewhere. That is how to win, use their ideas to draw them in. Otherwise, the Democrats will find themselves in the wilderness for many years if they even survive.
So yes. Joe Biden is obviously a communist and if he could only come back to the middle and do everything McConnell wants, the midterms will be saved. But it is in depicting this “middle” that this comment deserves a medal.
“Free voting rights id card”.
See, first, it’s not Joe Biden who wrote the current voting rights bill. To the best of my understanding, it is Joe Manchin, along with Republicans like Murkowski (judiciary.senate.gov). Said bill, as a reminder, would make voter ID requirement a national standard. You would think that Joe Manchin and Murkowski would be enough of a “middle” but apparently no, turns out Joe Manchin is also a filthy communist. Who would have guessed.
This, however, is nothing compared to what neither Manchin nor Murkowski nor anyone has bothered to propose in their endless negotiations. The middle wants free voting rights ID cards.
God yes.
Along the shameful list of things the rest of the developed world got around to have while the US (and UK, okay) still lags behind, there is the (free) national ID card. It is done at the State level, with a mix of passports, driver licenses and Social Security at the federal level because why make things simple. That makes for about 50 different standards and a potential poll tax of about $75-175 (wikipedia). Point being, if progressives had their way, a free federal ID would be unquestioned — along with automatic voter registration, etc.
And honestly, what are we talking about if not national ID cards? How do you deliver free “voting rights id” cards when you can’t even send mail-in ballots because “that’s fraud”?
So yes. Turn to the “middle”, that is centrists (sic) like Manchin and Sinema or Republicans like Romney or Murkowski, and they will look at this like you are trying to shiv Texas in a back alley. Turn to the “partially-radicalized party” (courtesy of Ross Douthat) and everyone from Joe Biden to Bernie Sanders to AOC will only complain that this wasn’t done some decades ago.
But if the “middle”, who turns out is the Democratic Party, were to propose a free ID card, McConnell would immediately scream about Big Brother and federal voter databases and a federal power-grab on the States and whatnot. Trumpists would rail about the guberment sending fake IDs to bloodthirtsy immigrants. And the same person who made that brilliant comment, that same person would come back denouncing out-of-touch disconnected Democrats for daring to offer a “free voting rights id card”. Even though the party would probably just expand on the 2005 REAL ID act and pay (and hopefully force) States to deliver (hopefully standardized) State IDs to every citizen.
So that’s the tale of the “middle”.
I want you to remember that tale, every time people tell you Biden is too much to the left. Not only is that politically laughable in the face of trumpism, and policy-wise absurd against a dozen ongoing crises like voter suppression and again, trumpism, but even electorally you have voters who are calling “the middle” what any outside observer would call “the left”.
Because Republicans offered +400 bills and none of them had free IDs whatsoever.