Democrats Take Turns Bashing Republicans at Georgia ‘Voter Suppression’ Senate Hearing

At a Senate “Voter suppression” hearing that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) dismissed as a “partisan circus” that encapsulated the GOP approach to the Democratic voting rights push, Democrats took turns bashing Republicans.

McConnell said of the hearing, “This silly stunt is based on the same lie as all the Democrats’ phony hysteria from Georgia to Texas to Washington D.C. and beyond — their efforts to pretend that moderate, mainstream state voting laws with more generous early voting provisions than blue states like New York are some kind of evil assault on our democracy.”

The hearing was the first field hearing the Senate Rules Committee hosted in 20 years and was led by chairwoman Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), an outspoken proponent of federalizing aspects of states’ election processes, according to Breitbart.

No Republicans participated, nor did they call any witnesses. at a hearing which focused largely on criticizing Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021.

Klobuchar kicked off the proceedings by declaring that “It has only been through the power of citizens standing up to the forces of oppression, through speaking truth to power that change has occurred” and called on Congress to “meet the moment.”

U.S. Sen Raphael Warnock (D-GA) gave the opening remarks where he blasted the bill and said, “Over the last year, Georgia has become ground zero for the sweeping voter suppression efforts we’ve seen gain momentum all across our country.”

Warnock also claimed at the hearing, “”What we did in Georgia this last election in terms of turnout should have been celebrated by everyone. Regardless of political party. But instead, it was attacked by craven politicians who were more committed to the maintenance of their own power.”

Sen. Raphael Warnock: "What we did in Georgia this last election in terms of turnout should have been celebrated by everyone. Regardless of political party. But instead, it was attacked by craven politicians who were more committed to the maintenance of their own power."

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 19, 2021

From the Washington Post:

While each of those testifying decried the new ballot-access provisions, multiple witnesses raised special alarms about the risk that, under the law, an election could be overturned entirely by partisan actors. Countermeasures against such “election subversion” is not included in the For The People Act, the Democratic bill that was blocked in the Senate last month, but Warnock and other senators have introduced separate legislation to address it.

State Rep. Billy Mitchell (D) told the panel that the Georgia law had in effect created “cheating umpires” by allowing the replacement of nonpartisan state and county officials with political appointees, “whose only concern is the will of the person who appointed them.”

“If they don’t like the outcome of an election, they can simply and immediately just take over the election board,” he said. “For that reason alone, these election laws should concern us all.”

Helen Butler, a voting rights activist and former member of the Morgan County, Ga., board of elections, described how she was removed from her elections position this month under the new law.

The provision, she said, “raises the specter that the goal will be to nullify the lawful vote of Georgia voters when the majority party is not satisfied with the outcome of an election, thereby achieving a result that the former president was unable to obtain in 2020.”

Another Democratic lawmaker, state Sen. Sally Harrell, described a rushed and partisan process inside the Georgia Capitol and accused her Republican counterparts of dissembling about the motivations and implications of the law, while a third witness, José Segarra, described spending hours in line on two occasions before he was able to successfully vote last year.

Harrell also highlighted a provision that allows any citizen to, for the first time, challenge an unlimited number of ballots, which she called a “form of intimidation,” while Segarra, an Air Force officer, asked the senators “to ensure that every eligible voter has the opportunity to participate, not just those of us who can take three hours off from work and stand in line.”

Republicans in Georgia — including officials who have debunked Trump’s claims of a stolen election, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — have defended the new law as a justified step to restore public faith in elections and create uniform standards across the state’s counties. In some areas — particularly rural counties — the law is likely to expand early voting, for instance.

But the witnesses’ claims of voter suppression and discriminatory intent won a uniformly friendly reception from the U.S. senators present — Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), plus Klobuchar and Warnock.

“The devil is in the details in these bills, and if you’re looking for evil, you can find it pretty easily,” said Klobuchar, who highlighted various provisions such as a new requirement that voters write their birth date on mail voting envelopes and a rule that effectively bars voters from registering to cast a ballot in the weeks before a runoff. “I don’t care if you are White or Black, if you’re in a rural area, you’re suburban or urban, these rules hurt you — hurt working people that are trying to vote.”

Speaking in a museum devoted to the battles of the 1950s and ’60s civil rights movement, every U.S. senator present put the current fight in the context of that struggle — with Warnock calling the current state-level crackdown the most serious rollback of voting rights since the Jim Crow era and Merkley comparing the Georgia law to the poll taxes of yesteryear.

Ossoff, who along with Warnock narrowly won election in a Jan. 5 runoff, accused Republican lawmakers of “surgically targeting Black voters.” He shared his own experience last year of waiting 4½ hours to vote in a ­majority-Black precinct.

“These restrictions are not meant to solve any real problem observed in the administration of Georgia elections,” he said. “The only real problem for Georgia’s GOP is that they lost.”