Jennifer Rubin makes the excellent point that republicans and democrats alike should care deeply about any serious challenge to our democracy, even if it means violating legislative norms like taking flight to Washington as our Texas dems have done—no matter how loudly Fox News' Peter Doocy screams about it.
While Jen Psaki handled such questions well, Rubin pointedly states:
"Fretting that Democrats aren’t abiding by political niceties and legislative norms while Republicans shred our democracy is the 21st-century equivalent of complaining that civil rights protesters were not sufficiently compliant, obedient and accommodating to those persecuting them.
Feeling indignant and acting upon such potentially injurious voter suppression bills poised to become law are not the problem. Rather it is both the intent of these lawmakers to commit harm and to do so with an autocratic mindset that throws our cherished democratic ideals and principles to the wind that should be setting off all kinds of alarms if we are also to not forfeit our instincts for survival in a democracy.
-Angela Valenzuela
#TexasDemocratsRock #TexasDemocrats #ForThePeopleAct #TexasDeservesBetter #SayNoToFascism #DemocracyAtRisk
White House press secretary Jen Psaki arrives for the daily news briefing at the White House on July 14. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Opinion by
Jennifer Rubin Columnist
July 15, 2021|Updated yesterday at 12:05 p.m. EDT
The ever-snide Peter Doocy, Fox News’s White House reporter, specializes in asking questions with built-in, right-wing talking points designed to create fodder for his propagandistic network. (Disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) If there is a Fox narrative to be advanced, he is the one to press for a sound bite that could perpetuate it. Why is Vice President Harris’s book being distributed at border detention facilities? (It wasn’t.) How can you say Republicans want to defund the police when it’s the Squad that talks about it? (Umm, because Republicans voted against funding for police, and no one in Democratic leadership supports defunding the police.)
His most recent exchange on Wednesday with White House press secretary Jen Psaki on the Texas Democratic lawmakers who left their state in an attempt to block proposed voter restrictions was telling:
Doocy: Thank you, Jen. About voting rights and these Texas lawmakers who have come to Washington. Do you know any — of any examples from his 36 years in the Senate that Joe Biden just hopped on a train and left town to avoid a vote that he knew he was going to lose?
Psaki: (Laughs.) Welcome back. (Laughter.) Look, I think that the President’s view is that these Texas legislators were making a statement through action in opposition to efforts in their state to oppose restrictions on people’s fundamental rights and their rights to vote in their state. That is why they departed.
The Pre— the Vice President met with these legislators yesterday, and the Vice President — and the President, I should say, certainly applauds their actions and their outspoken opposition to states — to efforts to put in place restrictive measures in their state.
Doocy: And maybe it is funny to think about it that way, but the President is talking about this as the most serious assault on democracy’s since the Civil War.
Psaki: I don’t think anything about — I don’t think anything about this is funny. I think what is important to note, though, here is that there are 28 states, including Texas, where there are laws in place or in process to make it harder to vote. And it requires bold action, it requires bold voices to speak out against that and make sure people understand their rights. That’s exactly what’s happening here.
Doocy: So does the candidate — who’s now President ... does he think that the best way to prevent something bad from happening — that he thinks is bad — from happening in Texas is for these lawmakers to be hiding out in a different state or for them to go back and sit down at the table?
Psaki: The President fundamentally believes you should work together in areas where you can find agreement, as he is on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework that is going to help rebuild roads and rails and bridges around our country, and also that you should be outspoken where you have concerns about affronts to democracy. That’s what he did yesterday, and that’s what these legislators are doing now.
For starters, Psaki was not making a joke. Doocy’s colleagues were laughing at him for his obviously contrived question designed to provide fodder for the MAGA media silo. She deftly explained that President Biden is all for working together when possible but that bold action is needed to protect against an unprecedented assault on democracy.
She might have continued this way:
The reason Democrats need to take unprecedented action is because for the first time in our history, we have one political party no longer committed to democracy. Aided by the “big lie” that the election was stolen, which Fox and other outlets amplified, Republicans have done what would have been unthinkable when President Biden was in the Senate. They have devised ways to suppress voting and, worse, to lay the groundwork to overturn election results they do not like. They are prepared to destroy democracy and the rule of law to stay in the good graces of the disgraced former president.
When confronted with Jim Crow legislation and a Supreme Court practically writing a manual for Republicans to defend voter-suppression laws, Democrats, independents and pro-democracy Republicans must find creative, peaceful ways to defend democratic values. That means advancing every viable legal challenge, using the full force of the federal government to prevent attempts to interfere illegally with vote-counting (as happened in Georgia in 2020) and using every legislative procedure available to defend the fundamental right to vote.
Not coincidentally, Jim Crow voices during the civil rights movement also whined that protesters were being disruptive and that they refused to play by the rules that White supremacists had set. It was this sentiment to which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. responded in his letter from a Birmingham jail: "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”
Fretting that Democrats aren’t abiding by political niceties and legislative norms while Republicans shred our democracy is the 21st-century equivalent of complaining that civil rights protesters were not sufficiently compliant, obedient and accommodating to those persecuting them.
One cannot have it both ways. You cannot throw out every democratic norm in pursuit of power while demanding your opponents dot every "i" and cross every “t.” I don’t for a moment suggest Democrats mimic Republicans (e.g., lie about election fraud, seek to suppress Republican voting, try to politicize the administration of justice). But every American should support lawmakers who refuse to capitulate in the face of anti-democratic attacks.
Next question?
I suppose such a response wouldn’t further the president’s desire to lower the political temperature in Washington. But it sure would be satisfying.
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