Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Monday torched the Democrats’ election takeover bill on the Senate floor as a purely “partisan power grab” by the left “to rig the rules of American elections permanently” in their favor.
As the Senate looks to vote on the Democrats’ election bill this week, McConnell took to the Senate floor to explain what the Democrats are trying to accomplish with their radical agenda. “Senate Democrats entered June with an agenda that was designed to fail. The Democratic leader planned votes on a host of the left’s most radical priorities,” McConnell said.
“None of it was ever intended to clear the Senate’s appropriately high bar for advancing legislation. Instead, the failure of their partisan agenda was meant to show somehow — somehow — that the Senate itself was failing,” the minority leader added. “For months, our colleagues built anticipation for the failure.”
He explained that this “particular radical proposal” was the “same bad bill since the House introduced its version back in 2019,” which has the “same nakedly partisan motives.” He added that “ever since democrats got the election outcome they wanted last fall, we watched our colleagues actually update the rationale for their latest partisan power grab.”
McConnell further explained that the Democrats have claimed the use of a filibuster is a racist tactic and legislatures that have passed elections are racist as well. McConnell noted those have all since been debunked. He said, “Remember, the last presidential election saw the highest voter turnout in decades — even amidst a once-in-a-century pandemic.”
In the last election, “African American turnout was twice as high in Mississippi as it was in Massachusetts,” he said, adding states like Georgia have since passed laws to update their election process after “lessons learned” from the pandemic, but Democrats label them a “redux of Jim Crow.”
“Even left-leaning fact checks debunked the claims,” he clarified. After the “train of disinformation” started, the left made it so “any state that dared to deviate from unique pandemic-era procedures faced summary judgment in the court of liberal outrage.”
McConnell explained what the Republican state legislatures have done to ensure safe and secure elections:
It doesn’t seem to matter that the facts tell a different story. The bill that led Texas Democrats to exercise the rights of a legislative minority last month requires more counties to adhere to new minimum hours for early voting. The Oklahoma bill that expanded early voting for elections was passed by a Republican legislature and signed by a Republican governor.
In my state of Kentucky, the expansion of both online registration and early voting this spring passed on a bipartisan basis, and a Democratic governor signed it. Democrats will continue to insist that S.1 is a response to these state laws, but we know it actually predates them, and we’re starting to see that our colleagues’ latest rationale for S.1 can be flexible when needed.
McConnell said Democrats had been outspoken against voter ID, though an overwhelming majority support the effort:
Prominent Democrats have railed against voter ID requirements for years, but now that voter ID is among the sticking points keeping the Democratic caucus from uniting behind S.1, some Democrats have started indicating, well, they’ve had a change of heart. Now, I would commend them for coming around to commonsense positions on that issue that 80 percent of Americans already support, but one supposed compromise among some Democrats bears more than a passing resemblance to the partisan power grab their party has touted for years.
The senator explained that the Democrats in the Senate made it clear their “real driving force” to pass their partisan election takeover bill is their own “desire to rig the rules of American elections permanently, permanently in Democrats’ favor.”
Story cited here.
