For the People Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, a one-party takeover of our political system--that is what Senate Democrats brought to the Rules Committee just yesterday, their side's top priority for multiple years now.

The supposed rationales for the bill continue to change. A few years ago, when majorities of Democrats were mistakenly convinced that foreigners had hacked voting machines and tampered with tallies in 2016, this was marketed as an election security bill. But it keeps morphing to suit new headlines. Lately, it has been called a racial justice bill. Some Senators say it is really a response to some recent State-level legislation, even though their bill predates those bills by multiple years.

A partisan power grab in search of a justification--that is what we have here. Voter turnout last November was the highest in decades. African-American turnout was twice as high in Mississippi as it was in Massachusetts. Democrats' hysterical attacks against the new election law in the State of Georgia have been dismantled even by typically left-leaning fact checkers.

There is no crisis. Our Democratic friends just want the power to rewire our democracy on a partisan basis. S. 1 would take the Federal Election Commission--the bipartisan panel that regulates elections and private citizens' speech--and make it a partisan body run by the Democrats.

It would let Washington Democrats act like a nationwide board of elections on steroids, neutering popular things like voter ID and forcing legalized ballot harvesting onto all 50 States. This bill would let bureaucrats snoop around more in free speech; attack citizens' privacy so dramatically that even the liberal ACLU is unhappy; and even send public funds--get this: public funds--directly to politicians.

Republicans put forward amendments to fix those things. If Democrats had wanted real, bipartisan solutions, Republicans were there, right at the table, and ready, but Democrats voted us down. They wouldn't even let us redirect any of that public money to the opioid crisis. They wanted that cash for their own campaigns.

This partisan power grab failed to advance out of committee for the same reason it must never ever become law as currently written. It will shatter public confidence in our democracy if the Democratic Party decides it can rig the rules

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