Cory Booker, white supremacist? Bloviation bares his party’s shameless playbook

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s dulcet tones pierced the air of Congress’ upper chamber Tuesday night.

“Do you know you have just broken the record?” he asked his Garden State counterpart, Cory Booker.

“Do you know how proud this caucus is of you? Do you know how proud America is of you?”

Just months ago, much of Schumer’s proud caucus and other top Democrats stood united behind a brazen lie as part of an effort to do away with the filibuster and push through their unpopular agenda.

As early as July 2020, Barack Obama was calling on the Senate to ditch the “Jim Crow relic.”

In 2022, Schumer pressured his colleagues to do just that, while accusing the GOP of trying to implement state-level “voter suppression laws.”

And in 2024, when he naively believed that Democrats might sweep the upcoming federal elections, Schumer started fantasizing again about eliminating the venerable Senate rule allowing a minority of members to halt the body’s business.

The media, as a matter of course, dutifully repeated the partisan talking point.

Vox offered to “explain” the legislative hurdle’s “racist history.”

The Associated Press reported that its “racist past” was fueling “arguments for its end.”

The Atlantic went so far as to call the filibuster “a monument to White supremacy.”

That hasn’t kept Senate Democrats from wielding the filibuster to block legislation, including a bill barring trans athletes from women’s sports, now that Donald Trump is back in the White House.

And there the minority leader was on Tuesday, showering Booker with praise for his so-called filibuster.

The Democratic playbook is as tedious as it is deceptive.

In any and every situation, Democrats mash every button they can conceive of with no regard for intellectual consistency or honesty.

When they’re in the majority, they claim the broadest possible mandate and seek to strip the Republicans of all minoritarian protections.

When they’re in the minority, they play the part of righteous rebels and cling to those same protections.

This maximalist approach — slash-and-burn politics, as it were — results in no shortage of embarrassment.

We saw two such examples on Tuesday alone.

First came Schumer’s backpedal on the formerly “Jim Crow” filibuster.

Then came progressive voters’ embrace of what Democrats have habitually characterized as “Jim Crow in the 21st century”: voter ID.

In Wisconsin, even as the Democrats’ state Supreme Court candidate prevailed over the Republicans’ choice, the same exact electorate also enshrined a voter ID requirement into the state constitution — by an overwhelming margin of more than 25 points.

Even that understates of the support for such laws nationally: A Pew Research poll from January found that 81% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, support such a requirement for all voters.

That’s despite a years-long campaign to smear Republicans for trying to carry out the public’s wish to see this common-sense policy implemented.

In a series of high-profile addresses during his presidency, Joe Biden accused red state governments of disenfranchising their citizens.

“The 21st century Jim Crow assault is real. It’s unrelenting,” Biden thundered in 2021.

A few months later, as he pushed a federal elections takeover that would have neutered immensely popular state voter ID laws, he compared Republicans — and even a pair of recalcitrant fellow Democrats — to the likes of Bull Connor, George Wallace and, get this, Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

When even some Democrats balked at his reckless rhetoric, Biden doubled down.

“I did not say that they were going to be a George Wallace or a Bull Connor,” he insisted. “I said we’re going to have a decision in history that is going to be marked just like it was then.”

“You don’t get to vote this way, and then somehow it goes away. This will be — stick with you the rest of your career and long after you’re gone.”

A bold but erroneous prediction.

What will stick instead is the shame of the many lies Biden told so freely from his powerful bully pulpit.

What’s even more noteworthy, though, is that they were all for naught.

Biden’s hysterical denunciations of “Jim Crow” voter ID laws fell as flat with the public as his predecessor’s overwrought criticism of the “Jim Crow” filibuster did.

Just as the effort to astroturf the appearance of grassroots enthusiasm for Booker’s act will fail.

No, the TikTok videos and memes don’t mean the Democrats are “back.”

No, Frank Luntz, Booker hasn’t “changed the course of political history.”

The party’s stunts are only slightly less counterproductive than its smears.

Democrats remain in the wilderness — because Americans see their cynical stratagems for the contemptuous farce that they are.

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.