‘S. 1 is a bad bill filled with bad ideas, and I’ve been crystal clear about opposing it from the very beginning… Nobody is fooled. And next week, the Senate will reject it.’
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding S.1:
“Next week, as the Democratic Leader has indicated, the Senate will finally get the opportunity to vote on the bill that House and Senate Democrats have both made their number one priority for the entire Congress.
“S. 1 is a bad bill filled with bad ideas, and I’ve been crystal clear about opposing it from the very beginning.
“But for Democrats themselves, coming up with a compelling rationale for this unprecedented political power-grab has been a long and winding road.
“It started, of course, in 2019. Back then, our friends on the Left were still trying to wrap their heads around a stunning defeat in the 2016 presidential election. So the Speaker of the House billed H.R. 1 as a major overhaul for what her party concluded was a profoundly broken democracy.
“Then, 2020 changed everything. A Democrat had won the White House. I guess our democracy wasn’t broken, after all. This time, apparently, federal authorities just needed urgent protection from state legislatures running their own elections.
“We’re talking about fundamentally the same bill. And one thing’s for certain: ‘major overhaul’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.
“The same awful guts are all in there:
“There’s the plan to forcibly rewrite large portions of the 50 states’ respective election laws…
“And the plan to create new publicly-funded accounts. Not for building roads and bridges, expanding rural broadband, or fighting the opioid epidemic.
“Just piles of federal dollars going to yard signs, balloons, and TV ads for candidates at least half of Americans disagree with.
“There’s the plan to trash a decades-old bipartisan consensus on the right way to call balls and strikes on elections and turn the even split of the Federal Election Commission into a partisan majority.
“And the one to give that majority new and broader tools for chilling the rights of citizens to engage in political speech it doesn’t like.
“It’s such a radical proposal that even prominent voices on the left have urged caution.
“Lawyers from the ACLU, no less, have sounded the alarm on its proposed encroachment on free speech.
“One liberal expert went even further, saying that if Democrats think their bill is, quote, ‘essential to secure democracy, they are self-deceived or deceitful.’
“And voters themselves are hardly convinced. When asked about election policies like voter I.D., large majorities consistently come down on the opposite side of Washington Democrats.
“And the bill is so transparently opportunistic, Democrats’ spin has failed to even unite their own majority here in the Senate.
“It’s a massive takeover of our electoral system with a fill-in-the-blank rationale.
“Nobody is fooled. And next week, the Senate will reject it.”
New S. 1 ‘Compromise’, Same Rotten Core
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) issued the following statement regarding S.1:
“Senate Democrats seem to have reached a so-called “compromise” election takeover among themselves. In reality, the plan endorsed by Stacey Abrams is no compromise. It still subverts the First Amendment to supercharge cancel culture and the left’s name-and-shame campaign model. It takes redistricting away from state legislatures and hands it over to computers. And it still retains S. 1’s rotten core: an assault on the fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should decide how to run their own elections.”