Phony Outrage on Voting Laws is Wearing Thin on the American People
‘Citizens know it isn’t attacking democracy to have things like commonsense voter ID and commonsense voter-list maintenance alongside lots of early voting, lots of mail-in voting, and lots of Election Day voting. That kind of combination isn’t an attack on democracy. It’s the definition of democracy. It’s exactly what Americans want.’
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding election laws:
“A few months ago, a group of Democrats and left-wing activists brought the state of Georgia into the national spotlight. Tremendous outrage, an air of total crisis, was cooked up out of nowhere.
“The state of Georgia was passing a mainstream, common-sense election law. It combined widely popular integrity protections like voter ID with a great deal of flexibility and availability to make voting easy. It codified more flexible early voting and more flexible mail-in voting than many Democrat-run states offer, including New York.
“Americans want to make it easy to vote and harder to cheat. Voter ID, for example, is popular with majorities of black, white, and Hispanic Americans.
“But in their ongoing bid to mount a Washington D.C. takeover of our nation’s elections, Democrats seized on this mainstream law and decided to start shouting that the sky was falling in Georgia.
“And unfortunately for the people of Georgia, many people in the press and in corporate America bought it!
“They got Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game out of Georgia. Actual work opportunities, actual prosperity for working people, were sacrificed to serve this fake hysteria.
“Well, today, Georgians got what you might call a very weak consolation prize. Today, a week after the All-Star Game was supposed to happen in Atlanta, Democrats themselves descended on the state to stage a bit of partisan theater.
“Last week, the traveling roadshow was Texas Democrats coming here to Washington to beg Senate Democrats to seize power away from their own citizens and local governments.
“This week, it was our own colleagues’ turn to board the jets. But the rhetoric was just as hysterical, and the conclusion was the same: Washington Democrats need to grab unprecedented power and rewrite all 50 states’ election laws.
“It’s the same shtick we’ve been hearing here in this chamber for multiple years now. Remember, their sweeping takeover bill was written long before any of the state laws which they now claim are prompting it.
“The phony outrage is wearing thin on the American people.
“Citizens know it isn’t attacking democracy to have things like commonsense voter ID and commonsense voter-list maintenance alongside lots of early voting, lots of mail-in voting, and lots of Election Day voting.
“That kind of combination isn’t an attack on democracy. It’s the definition of democracy. It’s exactly what Americans want.”
Related Issues: Senate Democrats
Next Previous
