Biden's Record on Busing (and Detours on Sensibility and Reporting with Shade)

 A cousin of mine passed along a cherry-picked list of places where Biden has failed to toe his party's line, or the party line of a certain faction among the Democrats, criticizing his record.

Or, perhaps, expressing dissatisfaction. It can be hard to tell between criticism and expressing dissatisfaction.

Well, I read that list last night and shrugged. (I'd seen it before.)

This morning, I thought maybe I should check the list. The easiest item for me to remember was busing, so I plugged something like

Did Biden vote against busing?

into the Web search engine, and found a lot of evidence that he has -- sometimes.

You have to check. 

(Kind of like, yesterday, when I plugged the name of a certain person arrested for committing voting fraud in Texas, along with the words "voting fraud". And I found reports that she had, indeed, been arrested. Then I shared one of those reports from a news source that would be local there on my BassHook feed. 

And then I found a report that the woman claimed she was trying to work a "sting" on the people who were working a sting on her. I noted that in my BassHook feed and moved on.

It makes a sort-of defense -- not a smart one, however.

If you are thinking of trying a counter-sting sting, be sure you let a few people you trust know what you are doing, to improve your ability to assert that is what you were doing. Preferably, one of those would be a lawyer, and, preferably, the lawyer would discourage you from doing so -- except perhaps in extreme circumstances. 

I don't have any idea if that was really what she was doing. Anyway, don't try to run a sting alone. It leaves you with no real defense.)

Back to Biden: 

Not surprisingly, one of the sources I found was a mixed news/opinion piece from 2019 on Vox, critical of both his and Harris's stances on busing:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/28/18965923/joe-biden-school-desegregation-busing-democratic-primary

Also not surprisingly, Vox is now supportive of Biden, since he has been able to get Trump out. People do change their stance for expediency.

I debated the expediency of giving Vox more clicks, but half of my purpose in this rant is to express the need for more information. 

If we want to talk meaningfully about something, we should have the topic of our conversation in front of us.

Otherwise, we generate more heat than meaning -- witness the excessive activism since midsummer.

So, reading the article (and other sources), I find that Biden has opposed bills that mandated busing based solely on numbers.

Uhm, can I say, bravo for him? 

That wasn't his only reason for introducing bills and amendments to bills that limited or would have limited the reach of court decisions and legislation on busing. He seemed to take a somewhat reasoned approach, and he was also sensitive to the opinions of his constituencies.

Maybe -- if we have to have a Democrat in the Whitehouse for the next four years, for balance -- maybe a Democrat who can understand that arbitrary, overly simplistic rules can cause problems might be one of the better options? and that he has to listen to all the people he is supposed to be representing, not just the ones who voted for him?

Just maybe?

Many of Biden's arguments against forced busing tend to focus on the allocation of resources. I'll go with that. 

I'll also note that forcing people to do the right thing generally causes resentment, and that resentment tends to boil over. I think a good argument could be made that busing is no small part of the cause of the violence of the past several months.

Busing has had some good results, as well. It's been a mixed bag.

That's not surprising, either. Politics is always a mixed bag.

Excessive adherence to ideologies is not helpful.

And lack of information causes more problems than too much.