President Joe Biden’s speech in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday touting the importance of voting rights on the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” couldn’t have come at a more awkward time.
Just days prior, Biden announced his support for a Republican-led resolution that would block criminal justice reforms overwhelmingly approved by Washington, D.C.’s city council. The move effectively usurps the power of the majority–Black council in a city in which roughly half the population is Black.
Because Washington, D.C., is not an independent state, all proposed Washington, D.C., laws are subject to congressional and presidential approval. Biden blocking the criminal justice reforms would mark the first time a president has allowed Congress to overturn a Washington, D.C., bill in 30 years.
Last week, I explained how Biden’s actions amounted to a betrayal of the Black voters who helped elect him, and how the move fits a broader, nationwide trend of racist power grabs by conservatives that diminish the autonomy of Black voters and the officials who represent them.
Biden’s speech on Sunday made no reference to his incoherent stance on voting rights, and instead relied on his typical rhetoric around voting, name-checking the late Democratic Rep. John Lewis and expressing support for a new Voting Rights Act.
His vow to essentially engage in his own form of voter suppression in the nation’s capital didn’t make it into his speech.
Speaking of 1965’s “Bloody Sunday” march, Biden said Sunday:
Six hundred believers put faith into action to march across that bridge named after the Grand Dragon of the KKK. They were on their way to the state capitol in Montgomery to claim their fundamental right to vote laid in the bedrock of our Constitution but stolen by hate harbored in too many hearts.
And the president reflected on where he was as the violence against protesters unfolded:
I was a student up north in the Civil Rights Movement. I remember feeling how guilty I was. I wasn’t here. How could we all be up there and you going through what you went through, looking at those — I can still picture — you can still picture the troopers with their batons and wands and whips.
Both statements from Biden imply a separation from racism, on his part, that doesn’t align with the facts. The idea that a young Biden needed to look to the South to see racism suggests he was deeply ignorant about the northern racism that surely existed at the time. And that ignorance seems to have extended into the present day. For example, when Biden spoke of the hate exhibited by vote suppressors back then, he failed to acknowledge how that hate may have influenced him.
The conservatives Biden is aligned with in opposing Washington, D.C.’s criminal justice reforms include members who’ve openly opposed Washington, D.C., statehood because they believe it would help Democrats. Biden is effectively in sync with these people in suggesting his intolerance toward crime — rather than Washington, D.C.’s autonomy — is the impetus for the historic power grab.
But there’s no reason to take Republicans at their word, and there’s little reason to take Biden at his either. (I’ll note, Biden has faced scorn from many liberals over his ineffective push to shore up voting rights.)
“The right to vote and to have your vote counted is the threshold of democracy and liberty,” Biden said Sunday. “With it, anything is possible. Without it — without that right, nothing is possible. And this fundamental right remains under assault.”
He’s correct. But he doesn’t seem to realize he’s among the assailants.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.