Democrats Who Freely Used the Filibuster Want to Break Senate Rules for Election Law Takeover
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding Democrats’ federal election takeover:
“When our colleagues’ reckless taxing and spending spree began to falter, some Democrats started saying a totally different issue was actually their top priority.
“If they don’t get to blow $5 trillion on low-quality socialism, our colleagues are now demanding a consolation prize: Breaking the Senate’s rules in order to give themselves sweeping control over all 50 states’ election laws.
“This is what some of our colleagues want so desperately. This is what they have sought for years. Even as their pretexts and justifications have kept shifting, the goal has stayed consistent: Most Washington Democrats want to appoint themselves a nationwide Board of Elections on steroids. And they want to shatter the Senate’s rules and traditions to make it happen.
“After Democrats lost the White House in 2016, they said this takeover was necessary because our democracy was fundamentally broken.
“Now that they’ve won the White House, their story has totally flipped. Now our democracy is in perfect shape, beyond reproach, except when states that Democrats don’t control dare to pass mainstream voting laws.
“The political left keeps pitching their Big Lie that mainstream state voting laws are somehow ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ if the Governor who signs the bill happens to be a Republican.
“The left’s Big Lie insults the intelligence of the American people. All the facts disprove it.
“In one of the states that triggered this meltdown, the new proposals mandated more days of early voting than many Democrat-run states provide.
“Our democracy is not in crisis. Repeating this rhetoric doesn’t make it factual. The 2020 election saw the highest turnout in more than 100 years.
“Only 33% of American adults think it’s too hard for eligible voters to vote. A larger share actually think current rules aren’t strict enough.
“This is fake hysteria, ginned up by partisans, and our citizens know it. Last November, even in New York, the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters rejected several left-wing ballot measures to change voting laws.
“This Big Lie — that democracy is dying because Democrats sometimes lose elections — is a completely astro-turfed sense of crisis. The emperor has no clothes.
“It’s even more ironic that on this most sensitive subject, our democracy itself, some Senate Democrats want to drop a procedural nuclear bomb on the Senate itself to get their way.
“Our colleagues have no principled opposition to the filibuster. None at all.
“In 2020 alone, Senate Democrats used the filibuster to repeatedly block the CARES Act, delaying help at the start of the pandemic. They used it to kill Senator Scott’s police reform bill.
“In 2017, 32 Senate Democrats – including then-Senator Harris – signed an open letter insisting the legislative filibuster should not change.
“And a few years before that, the current Democratic Leader said this about the prospect of nuking the filibuster:
“‘The ideologues in the Senate want to turn what the Founding Fathers called the cooling saucer of democracy into the rubber stamp of dictatorship…’
“‘They believe if you get 51% of the vote, there should be one party rule…’
“‘They want to make this country into a banana republic where if you don’t get your way, you change the rules!’
“‘It’ll be a doomsday for democracy if we do.’
“That was the current Democratic Leader, Senator Schumer, on why the Senate should preserve its filibuster rules.
“Some people’s tunes change when they happen to be in the majority versus in the minority. But some Senators mean what we say.
“There are Senators on both sides of the aisle who have had the courage to stand up for these important rules when we’ve been in the minority and when we’ve been in the majority.
“There are Senators on both sides who understand that any supposedly limited ‘carve out’ would bring the whole house crashing down.
“There are Senators on both sides who understand that the entirety of federal law shouldn’t go radically boomeranging back and forth every time the Senate narrowly changes hands.”
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Related Issues: Senate Rules, Democrats' Reckless Taxing And Spending Spree, Restoring the Senate, Senate Democrats, Campaigns & Elections
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