Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted Senate Democrats over their push to break the filibuster in order to pass a pair of election overhaul bills currently awaiting votes.
In a memo to Capitol Hill reporters published by his office Sunday morning, McConnell lambasted the Democrats’ efforts to use crisis rhetoric to ram the bills through the Senate. “This week, Democrats will make another run at their radical takeover — of the Senate, of elections, and of America,” the memo said. “They will try to use fake hysteria to break the Senate and silence millions of Americans’ voices so they can take over elections and ram through their radical agenda.”
“Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans have repeatedly stood up to the left and their Big Lie that there is some evil anti-voting conspiracy sweeping America. This week you’ll see even more from us,” the Minority Leader’s office promised.
The memo included several statements McConnell made over the course of last week in order to illustrate his point. They included an excerpt from a press conference, where McConnell accused Democrats of trying to “break the Senate”:
“It appears as if the majority leader is hellbent to try to break the Senate. His argument is that somehow state legislatures across the country are busily at work trying to make it more difficult for people to vote. Of course that’s not happening anywhere in America,” he said.
McConnell argued that 94 percent of Americans believe it’s easy to vote and there was record turnout in the 2020 presidential election, the biggest since 1900. He also noted that “it’s already against the law to prevent people from voting based on race” and “the Voting Rights Act is still intact.”
“So it’s appropriate to ask the question, ‘What’s going on here?’” he mused. “I think this this is an excuse to try to break the Senate.”
The memo also included excerpts from McConnell’s floor remarks, where he slammed “the left’s Big Lie” that election reforms in Republican States are threats to American democracy:
The political left keeps pitching their Big Lie that mainstream state voting laws are somehow “Jim Crow 2.0″ if the Governor who signs the bill happens to be a Republican. The left’s Big Lie insults the intelligence of the American people. All the facts disprove it.
In one of the states that triggered this meltdown, the new proposals mandated more days of early voting than many Democrat-run states provide. Our democracy is not in crisis. Repeating this rhetoric doesn’t make it factual. The 2020 election saw the highest turnout in more than 100 years.
Only 33% of American adults think it’s too hard for eligible voters to vote. A larger share actually think current rules aren’t strict enough.
This is fake hysteria, ginned up by partisans, and our citizens know it. Last November, even in New York, the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters rejected several left-wing ballot measures to change voting laws. This Big Lie — that democracy is dying because Democrats sometimes lose elections — is a completely astro-turfed sense of crisis. The emperor has no clothes.
McConnell also slammed leading Democrats for their hypocrisy on breaking the filibuster when it suits them, and said Democrats could not be trusted to secure the nation’s elections when they could not even secure the filibuster:
“The current Senate Democratic Leader once said that nuking filibuster rules would be a ‘doomsday for democracy.’ Just a few years ago, more than 30 Senate Democrats joined a bipartisan letter supporting the legislative filibuster. President Biden defended the principle in long, passionate speeches throughout his career. Just last year, as President, he repeated that destroying the filibuster would, ‘throw the entire Congress into chaos.’
“There is no partial or limited nuclear option on the table. As the senior Senator for West Virginia put it [last week], whenever you start talking about carving things out, you end up eating the entire turkey.
“No party that would trash the Senate’s legislative traditions can be trusted to seize control over election laws across America. Nobody who is this desperate to take over our democracy on a one-party basis can be allowed to do it.”
McConnell previously condemned Democratic leaders Thursday for trying to “exploit” the anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot in order to push for election reform and other key items of the Progressive agenda. “[It] has been stunning to see some Washington Democrats try to exploit this anniversary to advance partisan policy goals that long predated this event,” McConnell said.