[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 107 (Monday, June 21, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4640-S4641]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       FOR THE PEOPLE ACT OF 2021

  Mr. McCONNELL. Now, Madam President, on another matter, as I have 
noted before, Senate Democrats entered June with an agenda that was 
designed to fail. Our Democratic leader planned votes on a host of the 
left's most radical priorities. None of it was ever intended to clear 
the Senate's appropriately high bar for advancing legislation. Instead, 
the failure of their partisan agenda was meant to show somehow--
somehow--that the Senate itself was failing.
  For months, our colleagues built anticipation for the failure. They 
even started previewing the latest argument they have made when it 
happened. Apparently, the same Senate rule a Democratic minority had 
used with abandon was now somehow a racist relic to be abandoned by a 
Democratic majority.
  In the end, one particular radical proposal took priority. S. 1 is 
the same bad bill it has been since the House introduced its version 
back in 2019 with the same nakedly partisan motives. But ever since 
Democrats got the election outcome they wanted last fall, we have 
watched our colleagues actually update the rationale for their latest 
partisan power grab: States must be stopped from exercising control 
over their own election laws.
  The arguments here have one big thing in common with the ones our 
colleagues have deployed against the filibuster: debunked claims of 
racism.
  Remember, the last Presidential election saw the highest voter 
turnout in decades, even amidst a once-in-a-century pandemic, and 
African-American turnout was twice as high in Mississippi as it was in 
Massachusetts. But when Georgia passed targeted updates to its election 
laws based on lessons learned during the pandemic-era elections, 
Democrats trashed the bill as a ``redux of Jim Crow.'' They 
misrepresented its contents so wildly that even left-leaning ``fact-
checks'' repeatedly debunked these claims. But by then, the train of 
disinformation had left the station. Pretty soon, any State that dared 
to deviate from unique, pandemic-era procedures faced summary judgment 
in the court of liberal outrage. It hasn't seemed to matter that the 
facts tell a different story.
  The bill that led Texas Democrats to exercise the rights of a 
legislative minority last month requires more counties to adhere to new 
minimum hours for early voting. The Oklahoma bill that expanded early 
voting for general elections was passed by a Republican legislature and 
signed by a Republican Governor. In my State of Kentucky, the expansion 
of both online registration and early voting this spring passed

[[Page S4641]]

on a bipartisan basis, and a Democratic Governor signed it.
  Democrats have continued to insist that S. 1 is a response to these 
State laws, but we know it actually predates them. And we are starting 
to see that our colleagues' latest rationale for S. 1 can be flexible 
when needed. Prominent Democrats have railed against voter ID 
requirements for years, but now that voter ID is among the sticking 
points keeping the Democratic caucus from uniting behind S. 1, some 
Democrats have started indicating, well, they have had a change of 
heart. Now, I would commend them for coming around to commonsense 
positions on that issue that 80 percent of Americans already support. 
But one supposed compromise, among some Democrats, bears more than a 
passing resemblance to the partisan power grab their party has touted 
for years. It even introduces its own disastrous new liabilities, like 
a proposal to automate redistricting that is certainly constitutionally 
dubious.

  At the end of the day, Madam President, which concocted crisis 
Democrats choose as justification for their top legislative priority 
actually doesn't make much difference. They have made abundantly clear 
that the real driving force behind S. 1 is a desire to rig the rules of 
American elections permanently--permanently--in the Democrats' favor. 
That is why the Senate will give this disastrous proposal no quarter.

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