For the People Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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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 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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