Elections

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, now, on another matter, earlier this week, the Democratic leadership of the Judiciary Committee convened a hearing with the embarrassing title of ``Jim Crow 2021.'' It was the latest effort to use shocking rhetoric to distract from the specific details of actual voting laws in States like Georgia.

Amazingly, one of our Democratic colleagues testified before the committee that people actually shouldn't bother combing through the specifics of the law--don't bother reading the actual law. He suggested that ``narrow analysis only obscures the larger, unmistakable picture.'' Put another way, the facts deflate the narrative.

Misrepresentations of Georgia's election law have been debunked by fact checkers. The real, unmistakable picture is that the bill would expand early voting and make no changes to current election day hours-- none. Ironically, Democrats' own star witness at this week's hearing once sponsored and supported an earlier effort that would have cut early voting days in Georgia in half.

The facts puncture the left's big lie. Much of this overheated rhetoric seems like simple projection because there is, indeed, a piece of legislation that would create a stunning one-party takeover of voting laws and elections in our country, and that would be Washington Democrats' darling, H.R. 1. This is the bill that was first introduced back in 2019, with many Democrats still in denial that a Republican had won the White House in 2016.

It was marketed at that time as a wholesale transformation designed to salvage a broken democracy. But now that Democrats got an election outcome they liked better in 2020, what is essentially a xerox copy of the same overhaul is now being marketed, oh, as a modest step, just a modest step to maintain the status quo.

The first sales pitch was actually more honest. This 800-plus-page takeover would give Washington Democrats unprecedented control over 50 States' election laws, over a newly--listen to this--a newly partisan Federal Election Commission, over policing America's political speech. That is what it would do.

Now, Democrats know that the same Senate rules they happily used for the last 6 years will not make it easy to launch this awful proposal, so there is another important piece in their plan. They are aiming the same wild rhetoric at the Senate's own rules--at our rules here in the Senate.

The legislative filibuster which senior Democrats have loudly and proudly defended in the past, which Democrats used repeatedly in recent years, all of a sudden has become an offensive and outdated relic overnight. Isn't it amazing how this new awakening only happened when Democrats felt they had a chance to retake the majority.

Now, the American people can see right through this. Nobody is fooled. Nobody is fooled by their desperation to rewrite 50 States' election laws or the campaign to pack the Supreme Court or the attempt to pack the Senate with new blue States, rewriting the rules of American politics to exclusively benefit one side: their side. That was the Democrats' false charge in Georgia, but it is exactly what they are trying to do in this Capitol on a national scale.

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