[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 106 (Thursday, June 17, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S4601]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           ELECTION SECURITY

  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, next week, as the Democratic leader 
has indicated, the Senate will finally get the opportunity to vote on 
the bill that House and Senate Democrats have both made their No. 1 
priority for the entire Congress. S. 1 is a bad bill filled with bad 
ideas, and I have been crystal clear about opposing it from the very 
beginning.
  But for Democrats themselves, coming up with a compelling rationale 
for this unprecedented political power grab has been a long and winding 
road. It started back in 2019. Then, our friends on the left were still 
trying to wrap their heads around a stunning defeat in the 2016 
Presidential election, so the Speaker of the House billed H.R. 1 as a 
major overhaul for what her party concluded was a profoundly broken 
democracy.
  Then, 2020 changed everything. A Democrat actually won the White 
House. I guess our democracy wasn't broken after all. This time, 
apparently, Federal authorities just needed urgent protection from 
State legislatures running their own elections.
  So we are talking about fundamentally the very same bill. And one 
thing is for certain: Major overhaul doesn't even begin--begin--to 
describe it. The awful guts are all in there.
  There is the plan to forcibly rewrite large portions of the 50 
States' respective election laws and the plan to create new, publicly 
funded accounts not for building roads or bridges, expanding rural 
broadband, or fighting the opioid epidemic, but just piles of Federal 
dollars going to yard signs, balloons, and TV ads for candidates at 
least half of Americans disagree with.
  There is the plan to trash a decades-old, bipartisan consensus on the 
right way to call balls and strikes on elections and turn the even 
split of the Federal Election Commission into a partisan majority and 
the one to give that majority new and broader tools for chilling the 
rights of citizens to engage in political speech it doesn't like.
  It is such a radical proposal that even prominent voices on the left 
have urged caution. Lawyers from ACLU, no less, have sounded the alarm 
on its proposed encroachment on free speech. One liberal expert went 
further, saying that if Democrats think their bill is ``essential to 
secure democracy, they are self-deceived or deceitful.'' And voters 
themselves are hardly convinced. When asked about election policies 
like voter ID, large--large--majorities consistently come down on the 
opposite side of Washington Democrats. The bill is so transparently 
opportunistic, the Democrats' spin has failed to even unite their own 
party here in the Senate. It is a massive takeover of our election 
system with a fill-in-the-blank rationale. Nobody is fooled, and next 
week, the Senate will reject it

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