During a Senate Rules Committee Hearing on S.1, the so-called “For the People Act,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) hammered the bill as a partisan power grab and takeover of elections.
“Why are our friends on the other side so desperate to push it through?” the Minority Leader questioned. He asked, “why are Democrats so hell-bent on doing whatever it takes to rewire our democracy on a thoroughly partisan basis?”
“Let’s take a look at the bill,” he continued. “This legislation will let Washington Democrats dictate the terms of their own reelection races by rewriting all 50 states’ election laws.”
McConnell claimed the Democrats hope for “ludicrous” mandates that would institutionalize ballot harvesting across the country and get rid of safeguards put into place like having voter IDs.
He said, even though the Democrats have only a very slim majority in the House and Senate, with only 50 Democrats, “they want to make themselves the board of elections for every county and state in America.”
But, McConnell said, “voting regulations are just the start. This legislation with deliberately turn the Federal Elections Commission into a partisan Democratic panel.” If this bill passed, the Democrats would unilaterally have “their own side enforcing election law on their own.”
This would not have them “authorize federal bureaucrats to poke around in a much broader slice of private citizens’ free-speech.”
The bill the Democrats are attempting to pass “would attack Americans’ privacy rights to such an extreme degree that even the liberal ACLU is sounding alarm bells about this bill.”
McConnell continued:
It would have the federal government take public money and send it directly to political campaigns so Americans can subsidize robo-calls, junk mail, and TV ads for candidates they disagree with. So the marketing has changed constantly: this is gone from election security bill, to an ethics bill, to a racial justice bill — who knows what it will be labeled tomorrow.
Last month, a poll released by Fox News showed the overwhelming majority of voters support the requirement to show a valid ID to prove citizenship before voting. The overwhelming percent went as high as 77 percent from a national poll.
The survey shows that 95 percent of Republicans support showing a valid ID in order to vote, as well as 76 percent of independents and 60 percent of Democrats.
Even a poll taken by AP-NORC shortly before Fox which showed 72 percent also supported some sort of voter identification requirements. Ninety-one percent of Republicans backed requiring all voters to provide photo ID in order to vote. Fifty-six percent of Democrats said the same.
