Good morning,

Let’s start with some bad news for someone not named Joe Biden! Boris Johnson, whose approval numbers were already down in the mid-to-low 20s, is embroiled in a new crisis over a party at No. 10 in May 2020 that flouted the lockdown in effect at the time and that he previously described as being within the rules. The British Labour Party says he misled Parliament. In recent polls, Labour has snuck ahead, but just barely. And Labour leader Keir Starmer is, uh, far more popular than Johnson—his latest approval number is in the high 20s!

Since we’re on Europe, let’s check in quickly on France, where elections are just around the corner (April). Emmanuel Macron has had a pretty tumultuous term, what with the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) protests, initially in response to a proposed gas tax increase. He was down in the 20s then, but lately he’s up in Biden territory, the sorta-mid-40s. And he leads the polls in the multicandidate field at 26 percent, followed by right-winger Marine Le Pen at 17 percent, who is followed by right-winger Valérie Pécresse at 16 percent, who is followed by ultra-right-winger Éric Zemmour at 12 percent (see a pattern?). Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leading candidate of the left, is in single digits.

OK, let’s come back home, where Co-President Manchin reiterated yesterday after Biden’s very-strong-but-very-late voting rights speech that he’s against changing the rules to allow a voting rights bill to pass. As I write these words early Wednesday morning, Chuck Schumer is on Morning Joe saying that literally every Democratic senator is personally lobbying Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, some of them telling the pair, “If we don’t pass this, I will lose” reelection. So much for Senate bonhomie.

Punchbowl News (subscription) this morning describes an arcane process whereby the House would pass some other bill, strip out the language, then insert voting rights language, and hand that bill to the Senate. What would that mean? Basically, that instead of having to clear two cloture votes, it would only have to clear one. Which of course is still impossible.

One interesting point Biden made in his speech was that 16 currently sitting Republican senators voted to extend the Voting Rights Act back in 2006, when extending the act passed the Senate 98–0. They’re showing clips on MSNBC of Texas Senator John Cornyn saying back then that the VRA was the “most important and effective civil rights legislation ever passed. Bar none.” And Lindsey Graham said it was his “hope that 25 years from now, it will be said there is no need for the Voting Rights Act” because times have changed. Well, times have changed, all right, but in a different way than Graham then hoped, and he’s helping to drive the change train.

And let’s not allow Mitt Romney’s comments to go unremarked. Grabbing hold of a line from Biden’s speech in which he said the goal of some Republicans was “to turn the will of the voters into a mere suggestion,” Romney argued that Biden was now going down “the same tragic road taken by President Trump, casting doubt on the reliability of American elections.”

Now that’s some impressive logic. Let’s see. Team A loses a game. They go before their fans and complain that they were cheated by Team B and the refs and the media that covered the game. They get their fans to believe them, work them into a lather. The leader of Team B finally stands up and says that Team A is trying to invalidate long-standing rules. And a guy on Team A who’s been critical of his team turns around and says now Team B is just as bad as Team A, simply for standing up and pointing out the truth of the matter, a truth on which this particular member of Team A has in the past agreed. I give up.

At NewRepublic.com, Matt Ford looks at the history of the Electoral Count Act and argues that there actually may be some hope for progress on this front. Grace Segers gathers reactions to the Biden speech and quotes Martin Luther King III as saying, “He can’t rest this call at the feet of the Senate and walk away.” And Kate Aronoff writes that the Biden administration’s choice to counter “Russian gas” puts geopolitical interests ahead of the climate fight. 

Thanks for reading,

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Yesterday’s political history question: Back in 1965, the Senate passed the original Voting Rights Act. What was the vote margin, and how did the members of each party vote? (It was quite the contrast to today’s partisan divisions.)

Answer: The vote was 77–19, with 47 Democrats and 30 Republicans voting in favor, and 17 Democrats (from the South) and just two Republicans opposing. Those were different times, as Lou Reed sang.

Today’s current events question: Freedom House, which has for years monitored freedom in the world’s nations in terms of political and civil rights, measures something it calls the “democracy gap”: the number of countries where freedom is on retreat against the number where freedoms have made gains. In 2005, the number was +31. In 2010, it was -15.  In 2015, it was -29. What was the 2020 number?