[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 70 (Thursday, April 22, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S2139]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               ELECTIONS

  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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