McConnell Tears into Biden’s Atlanta Speech: ‘Incoherent, Incorrect, and Beneath His Office’

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) tore into President Biden’s speech advocating a suspension of filibuster rules, in remarks on the Senate floor on Wednesday.

“The president’s rant — rant — yesterday was incoherent, incorrect, and beneath his office,” McConnell said.

Biden gave a speech at Morehouse College in Atlanta on Tuesday in an attempt to drum up support for suspending filibuster rules in order to pass voting legislation. McConnell blasted the speech as a demagogic attempt to cast Republicans as racists over their opposition to federalizing elections.

“The president repeatedly invoked the January 6th riot while himself using irresponsible, delegitimizing rhetoric that undermines our democracy,” McConnell continued. “The sitting president of the United States compared American states to totalitarian states. . . . So the world saw our commander-in-chief propagandize against his own country to a degree that would have made Pravda blush.”

McConnell decried Biden’s rhetoric as painting millions of voters and a majority of the Senate as “racist.”

“A president shouting that 52 senators and millions of Americans are racist unless he gets whatever he wants is proving exactly why the Framers built the Senate to check his power,” McConnell said. “This whole display is the best possible argument for preserving the Senate rules that extend deliberation, force bipartisan compromise, and let cooler heads prevail.”

Biden compared opponents of Democrats’ voting legislation to southern segregationists in his Tuesday speech, asking, “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?”

One of the bills, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, would restore portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required districts with a history of discrimination to obtain approval from the Justice Department before changing voting rules.

A second bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, would set a 15-day minimum early voting period, set national voter-ID standards that would include a range of documentation, make it easier for residents to sue states over redistricting issues, and make Election Day a federal holiday.