[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 126 (Monday, July 19, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S4938]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





                             ELECTION LAWS

  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, now on an entirely different matter, 
a few months ago, a group of Democrats and leftwing activists brought 
the State of Georgia into the national spotlight. Tremendous outrage, 
an air of total crisis, was cooked up, cooked up out of nowhere.
  The State of Georgia was passing a mainstream, commonsense election 
law. It combined widely popular integrity protections, protections like 
voter ID, with a great deal of flexibility and availability to make 
voting easy. It codified more flexible early voting and more flexible 
mail-in voting than many Democratic-run States offer--for example, New 
York.
  Americans want to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. Voter 
ID, for example, is popular with majorities of Black, White, and 
Hispanic Americans. But in their ongoing bid to mount a Washington DC 
takeover of our Nation's elections, Democrats seized on this mainstream 
law and decided to start shouting that the sky was falling down in 
Georgia--the sky is falling down in Georgia.
  Unfortunately, for the people of Georgia, many people in the press 
and corporate America bought it. They got Major League Baseball to move 
its all-star game out of Georgia. Actual work opportunities, actual 
prosperity for working people, were sacrificed to serve this faked 
hysteria.
  Well, today, Georgians got what you might call a very weak 
consolation prize. Today, a week after the all-star game was supposed 
to happen in Atlanta, Democrats themselves descended on the State to 
stage a bit of partisan theater. Last week, the traveling road show was 
Texas Democrats coming here to Washington to beg Senate Democrats to 
seize power away from their own citizens and local governments.
  This week, it was our own colleagues' turn to get on the jets, but 
the rhetoric was just as hysterical and the conclusion all the same: 
Washington Democrats need to grab unprecedented power and rewrite all 
50 States' election laws. It is the same shtick we have been hearing 
here in this Chamber for multiple years now.
  Remember, their sweeping takeover bill was written long, long before 
any of the State laws which they now claim are prompting it. This phony 
outrage is wearing thin on the American people. Citizens know it isn't 
attacking democracy to have things like commonsense voter ID and 
commonsense voter list maintenance alongside lots of early voting, lots 
of mail-in voting, and lots of election-day voting.
  That kind of combination isn't an attack on democracy; it is the 
definition of democracy. It is exactly what Americans want.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The majority whip.

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