Is a law good or bad? Is a particular part of a law justified or unjustified? Does a law place a new burden on people or just not remove a newly claimed burden, or even worse, not make things as easy as they might be without the law? These are relevant questions that somehow seem to elude those who have turned up the hype to 11.

 “The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real,” President Biden claimed Tuesday. “We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War—that’s not hyperbole,” he said in the same speech. “The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol, as insurrectionists did on January the 6th.”

That sounds pretty darned serious. And it must be, as NYT columnist Charles Blow writes “Welcome to Jim Crow 2.0.” After 20 paragraphs of explaining the first Jim Crow, Blow concludes in his final four grafs that it’s Biden and the Dems in Washington enabling the return of Jim Crow.

President Biden hasn’t declined to intervene, but he has dragged his feet and not used the full force of the bully pulpit and still hasn’t given a full-throated endorsement of ending the filibuster to protect voting rights.

America is having a déjà vu moment, reliving in real time a horrendous history of more than a century ago, and it is impossible for to understand how Democrats in Washington don’t see that.

And if that doesn’t give you the willies, this surely will.

There is no reason to believe that this round of voter suppression is the end of those efforts, and every reason to dread that any successful implementation of them would serve as an accelerant of further suppressive efforts.

In the comments to Blow’s column, someone noted that at no point in his post does he mention anything that’s actually wrong, bad or suppresses anyone’s vote. A more woke respondent then explains it’s not Blow’s job to explain what’s wrong, but the proponents of Jim Crow to explain why it’s not wrong. HA!

Obviously, the Texas voting law must be even worse than the horrifying Georgia law that prohibited handing out water on line, which is just another poll tax. So what was being done in Texas that compelled Democratic legislators to hop on a plane and fly away rather than let their Republican counterparts disenfranchise all black voters?

What’s proposed in Texas? First, the bills would end two practices that Harris County pioneered last year amid the pandemic: drive-through voting and 24-hour voting. These options were used disproportionately by nonwhites. Perhaps they made sense when every Texan was urged to stay six feet from every other Texan.

There were a lot of accommodations made as a result of the pandemic, many without notice or deliberation, often on an emergency basis. Experiments were used to facilitate voting in a pandemic, and for the most part, they worked out pretty well. There was no epidemic of voter fraud.

But if the Legislature doesn’t want them to be permanent, then reverting to the pre-Covid status quo of 2019 is not some epochal loss for voting rights. Gov. Greg Abbott argues that drive-through voting breaks the traditional privacy of the polling booth. “Are you going to have people in the car with you?” he asked. “It could be somebody from your employer or somebody else who may have some coercive effect on the way that you would cast your ballot.”

Abbott’s rationale doesn’t cut it. There’s no evidence that there’s a problem with people being coerced during drive-through voting, and if voter privacy was a sincere concern, it would seem easy enough to remedy by having the voter step out of the car for a minute, vote in private, and then hop back in and drive away.

But if they can drive to drive-through voting, why can’t anybody other than the disabled just vote like everyone else? Sure, there might be a line, they might have to walk a few hundred feet, but is that voter suppression?

As for 24-hour voting, it isn’t unreasonable to think polling-place mischief might be more likely at 3 a.m. Public confidence can be undermined by even false claims about what happened in the dead of night, including President Trump’s wild allegations about ballot “dumps.” The Texas bills would allow broad voting hours: 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the Senate version, or 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. in the House version.

How significant the need is for 24-hour voting has yet to be shown. Are there really a substantial enough number of voters who can’t vote at any other time than 3 am? The biggest issue with 24-hour voting is staffing the polls. Given that we now have a variety of alternative means of voting, vastly extended days and hours, mail-in voting, is this more than belt, suspenders, and another belt or two?

This is not a blockade of the ballot box. To the contrary, in some places the bills would expand mandatory early voting hours. Current law says that in the final week before Election Day, counties with 100,000 people must open their “main” polling place for 12 hours on weekdays and five hours on Sunday. The House would lower the population threshold to 55,000, and the Senate would set it at 30,000. Both would also require six hours of Sunday voting.

There is little doubt that both parties are working hard to do what they believe to be in their perceived interest. The Dems have the better argument, as facilitating the public right to vote does more to further the exercise of democracy than not, and the Reps claim that we need to protect against voter fraud are, at least up to now, frivolous. But what this is not is a War on Democracy or Jim Crow 2.0. What it is are fairly pedestrian voter laws that skirt the edge of what we learned about facilitating voting from the pandemic, the practicalities of running an election and the totally normal limits we place on how voting should be done.

But this is about laws, some of which seem pretty unremarkable and others somewhat controversial. If there is an issue with a law, explain the law and explain the issue. Instead, this is what our national discourse has become.

Lincoln Project senior adviser Stuart Stevens tells Joy Reid that, if the For the People Act (HR-1/S-1) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act aren't passed and signed into law, Republicans will carry out a terrorist attack on par with September 11 pic.twitter.com/hSbgEavrpo

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 14, 2021

Never in the history of America has voting been as easy, as accommodating and as widely available to everyone as it is today. If every one of these “voter suppression laws” was enacted, voting would still be vastly easier than it was in any election before 2019. And yet this is the War on Democracy. At least for today.