Voting Rights

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, now on one final matter, later today, the Democratic leader will have the Senate vote on the latest iteration of his party's election takeover scheme.

Frankly, I have just about lost count of how many times our Democratic colleagues have tried to truss up the same takeover with new trappings. For multiple years running, Washington Democrats have offered a rotating merry-go-round of rationale to explain why they need to federalize voting laws and take over all of America's elections themselves, but every time they try this shtick in the Senate, it falls flat. Today will be no exception.

This latest umpteenth iteration is only a compromise in the sense that the left and the far left argued among themselves about exactly how much power to grab and in which areas. This latest bill still subjects popular, commonsense election integrity protections like voter ID to the whims of Federal bureaucrats. It still sends government money to political campaigns--government money, taxpayers' money, to political campaigns, for goodness' sake. It still puts Washington in the middle of the States' redistricting decisions and on and on. The same rotten core is all still there.

The Senate knows how to make a law in a productive, bipartisan way. We have done it this year on multiple subjects. We have done it on election issues themselves in recent memory--the Help America Vote Act 20 years ago that Chris Dodd and I put together. We did that when there was an actual problem that needed solving and an actual bipartisan process. But as long as Senate Democrats remain fixated on their radical agenda, this body will continue to do the job the Framers assigned it and stop terrible ideas in their tracks.

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