WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) delivered the following remarks today on the Senate floor regarding voting laws:
“The massive taxing and spending spree that Democrats want to ram through this summer has problems that go even beyond inflation, rising costs, and massive tax hikes.
“The problem is not just Democrats’ jaw-dropping $3.5 trillion price tag. It’s also the long list of bad liberal policies that this reckless taxing and spending spree is supposed to purchase.
“I spoke yesterday about just a few of those bad ideas.
“They’re talking about amnesty for illegal immigrants….
“Socialist price-fixing that would leave us with fewer new prescription drugs, fewer new treatments and cures…
“They want to permanently change the Child Tax Credit into welfare with no work requirements…
“Smuggle in big chunks of the Green New Deal…
“And in case all of this were not enough, some Senate Democrats want to use this taxing and spending spree to grab control over all 50 states’ election laws.
“Remember, for several years now, our Democratic friends have claimed that every successive election proved they needed to grab partisan control over our democracy.
“In 2016, 2018, and 2020… win or lose… when foreign interference occurred and when it did not occur… every possible result has been claimed as proof that Washington Democrats should rip up our democracy’s rule book and write a new one that benefits them.
“The latest phony justification has been the false notion that a few states’ mainstream voting laws equal some kind of assault on democracy as we know it.
“Of course, that’s utter nonsense.
“Americans want it to be easy to vote and hard to cheat. Voter ID protections are hugely popular. Basic voter roll maintenance is common sense.
“The new law in Georgia, for example, provides for more flexible early voting and absentee voting than many blue states including New York.
“But the facts weren’t about to stop the Democrats’ big lie. The absurd comparisons to Jim Crow segregation and all kinds of other horrors have continued apace.
“To provide a little more context around this fake hysteria, we can also look internationally.
“As one columnist recently observed in the Washington Post, the balance struck by the state of Georgia amounts to, quote, “one of the most expansive voting access laws in the world. Most other countries do not allow no-excuse absentee voting, and dropboxes are also virtually unknown elsewhere…
“If Georgia’s elections are undemocratic, then almost all of our democratic allies are also undemocratic.” End quote.
“If liberal activists and woke corporations believed their own rhetoric, they wouldn’t stop at boycotting and threatening the state of Georgia. They couldn’t possibly. They’d be busy trying to divest from most of our NATO allies and essentially the rest of the developed world.
“Some European countries allow mail-in voting, but most do not. We constantly hear from our socialist friends how we should be emulating Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark — well, none of them allow in-country postal voting. Bring on the boycotts, I guess.
“And you don’t even want to hear about early voting. Goodness gracious. France, Spain, Germany, Italy, the U.K., Ireland — not a day of in-person early voting in any of those countries. That’s according to an international NGO that studies democracy.
“Remember, the Texas and Georgia laws codify a whole lot of early voting… and mail-in voting… and lots of Election Day voting.
“And this is supposed to be the death of democracy? Some outrage on a global and historic scale?
“Give me a break. Even going by Texas’s new proposals, there will be voting by mail in Paris, Texas but not in Paris, France. There would be almost two weeks of in-person early voting in New Berlin, Texas but zero days in Berlin, Germany.
“I’m sure Democrats will be yelling at the Fortune 500 to boycott Europe any day now.
“Of course, the reality is that these moving goalposts are fake.
“The frantic outrage is phony. It’s all meant to justify a political power grab that Democrats have had written and waiting since years before any of these new state laws which are supposedly prompting it.
“Yet another awful plank that my colleagues across the aisle want to hide in the reckless taxing and spending spree they hope to ram through Congress.”