JUST IN: Senate GOP Condemns And Rejects Democrats' Revised Version Of For The People Act

it's like a dream come true 16 members of the senate that want to talk about this bill well thank you all for being here obviously my colleagues and i are here to talk about s1 we haven't seen the final version of s1 yet but it appears to look a whole lot like the original version of s1 bid on built on the totally uh bad foundation of the federal government taking over the structure of elections in 10 000 election jurisdictions around the country you know in 2016 president obama said that the diversity of our system was the strength of the system now i don't know if he still believes that or not but i do i think states and localities have done a great job for a long time conducting elections this bill is riddled with things that would have devastating impact on the system people will lose confidence in the election system if this bill would pass my colleagues i'm sure are going to talk about all of those things and if not i'll fill in whatever is untalked about as we have a chance to talk about this bill that will come to the floor next week the senate should reject this bill i believe the senate will reject this bill and i'm glad to have senator mcconnell here thank you well i think all of you surely know how all republicans feel about this proposal it's a solution in search of a problem the rationale for it has changed over the years after the 2016 election the same bill was introduced in the house and as soon as they got the majority they passed it and the rationale at that point was we needed to clean the system up then they liked the outcome of the 2020 election and so the rationale became we need to prevent states from somehow making it more difficult for people to vote i've taken a look at all these new state laws none of them are designed to suppress the vote there's no rational basis for the federal government trying to take over all of american elections you all have noticed that there's now a debate among democrats over a revised version produced by one of the democrats yesterday which has been endorsed by stacey abrams so i would make this observation about the revised version it still turns the federal election commission from a judge into a prosecutor by taking away the 3-3 balance and making it 3-2 democratic and in what is of extraordinarily dubious constitutionality would remove redistricting from state legislatures and hand handed over to computers equally unacceptable totally inappropriate all republicans i think will oppose that as well if that were to be surfaced on the floor that's not what we anticipate the cloture motion to be on so the democrats have basically two big priorities one is the just the regular liberal stuff that you would expect from them which is very radical massive spending massive tax increases open borders undermining american energy and then the other is stacking the deck which to me is much more dangerous in their effort to become a permanent majority party and they do that by their legislation to add four members of the supreme court they want to add d.c as a state with two permanent democrat senators and this bill s one they name it s one because it is their number one priority so i had our secretary of state ed buchanan from wyoming look at this and what he says is and this is a letter from him it will open up the election process to the great potential for widespread fraud which will only exacerbate our citizens collective fears widespread fraud and why does he say that well i'll give you a couple of quick examples one is it bans voter id where people when they go and ask for a ballot are normally in wyoming and certainly around the country asked to prove that they are who they say they are number two it allows for ballot harvesting allowing people unsupervised to go and collect hundreds if not thousands of ballots and then decide what they're going to do with them and number three is it mandates taxpayers to fund elections by putting money taxpayer dollars into campaigns of people they may be completely against it's an 800-page bill what i'd outline there is just the tip of the iceberg the more people find out about this the less they like it it is radical it's extreme it is dangerous it is scary we need to make it easier for people to vote harder for people to cheat the democrats in their bill are making it much easier for people to cheat i'll just talk about one provision of this i mean think about what the democrats are doing they're taking a vote to give themselves money so they want to take your tax to pay dollars and they give it back to themselves i mean manipulate the vote if you're a california senator you're going to get up to 80 million dollars for your campaign how many people think that's appropriate if you're warning georgia for his re-election he has a chance to get 25 million dollars of your tax dollars kelly in arizona has has the opportunity to get 19 million dollars of your tax dollars in his next election chuck schumer he should like this a lot he has a chance of getting 44 million dollars in your tax money for his campaign that's wrong we should never be taking taxpayer dollars and given politicians to go run attack ads and win an election in tennessee we have really well run elections and we want to continue to have really well run elections we believe in one person one vote and as i talk to tennesseans and as they look at this legislation that is what concerns them the most because they saw this in 2020 when they would go on social media and they would see people holding up numerous ballots from some of our neighboring states and saying look what came in the mail to me well they don't want that they want to preserve one person one vote and the integrity of the electoral system s1 and all of the different versions of s1 in essence are pieces of legislation that will make it literally easier to cheat they will be useful ways to cheat in an election it's pretty clear that s-1 is a effort to hijack the state election laws for partisan advantage here in washington d.c in the congress the democrats have created a false narrative that suggests that some of these state election law changes are somehow designed to prevent minorities from casting their ballot that's already illegal under section two of the voting rights act and it's blatantly false the fact of the matter is many of the reforms that they're complaining about are even more generous than the vote than the laws in states that they represent for example uh the deadline to request a mail-in ballot in georgia is 11 days before the election in new york represented by senator schumer you cannot request a mail-in ballot until a week before the election in-person voting was expanded in georgia to 17 days in massachusetts you have 11 days delaware represented by the president united states for many years in the senate won't even have any early voting until 2022 and even then voters would only have 10 days so it's clear that the democrats narrative of widespread voter suppression that would be created by these laws is a false narrative again this is merely a vehicle by which our democratic colleagues would hijack state election laws for purely partisan advantage senate bill one is is the third act in a three-act play the democrats seeking to grab power here in washington d.c the first act was d.c statehood the second act was packing the united states supreme court the third part of the three-part series now is is senate bill number one in montana you have to produce a photo id to get a hunting license you produce a photo id to get a phishing license you produce a photo id to rent a car you produce a photo id to check into a motel in montana's know that's common sense and that's why this spring the montana legislature passed a bill requiring photo id to vote and was signed by our governor shortly after that bill was signed senator schumer went to the floor of the united states senate and specifically called out the montana law and said it's despicable 70 of the american people believe that photo id is appropriate to vote montana's don't see this as despicable they see it as common sense i'm on the rules committee and after we had our hearing on this bill i heard from nebraskans because nebraskans heard for the first time what's really in the bill you know we tried to point that out i'd like to follow up with what senator scott spoke about the money that's in this bill this is a windfall for sitting senators we all know the power of incumbency but when you're using federal money on a six to one match that is not helpful to voters why would we have something like that in there because it's a windfall that the democrats saw i gave them the chance to take that out i introduced an amendment that would have not allowed any sitting senator to use that money to qualify for that money to benefit from that money every single democrat voted no on my amendment the more we find out about this bill the more our constituents find out about this bill the more upset people are because they're trying to be sold a bill of goods that isn't there and when they find out what is in this spill they're appalled by it uh so the mother of all power grabs is going to fail in this bill there's a provision to change who draws congressional maps when the population shifts number one the hr1 version of this bill was filed before any republican legislative bodies met to change their law they have this in mind it's got nothing to do with georgia it's got nothing to do with montana they filed this crap early on to try to get an advantage in perpetuity and call all of us racist it ain't going to work in south carolina 30 percent of the my state plus as african-american we had the largest participation in the history of the state in the last election if you want to vote in south carolina you you can but you got to prove you are who you are the best evidence of the political nature of this bill is that they want to take away from red states where people are moving the ability to draw lines we're going to pick up four or five seats as republicans because of the census under this bill this independent commission would take away from florida montana and texas the ability to draw these lines this has got nothing to do with improving voting it has everything to do with locking in perpetual power by the left so s1 is a bill is really designed to be able to federalize elections the basic theme of s1 and the younger newer version smaller version we understand we haven't seen it of s1 is all about everything that washington dc does is righteous everything the states do is wrong listen it shouldn't be a hard principle to be able to say let's make voting easy let's make cheating hard s1 is not only voting easy cheating easy but verifying elections impossible there should be a way after an election is over to be able to verify that election that would not be possible with s1 let me just give you a couple of examples on that taking away all voter id which even the supreme court has upheld voter id take away all voter id anywhere in the country not only matching no voter id but doing same-day registration so you could do same-day registration in a new precinct without voter id and walk up and vote no way to verify on top of that it also bans any prohibition on ballot harvesting so you would literally have the day of the election individuals showing up from political parties with boxes full of ballots that they have collected from people around the state or around the precinct and they can just show up with those no chain of custody no way to be able to verify those in any way they were collected by political operatives dropped off on the day of the election it is impossible to be able to verify an election this does not make americans more confident in our election system it makes us less confident in our elections this bill isn't about strengthening democracy this bill is about strengthening democrats this bill won't make it easier to vote it will make it easier to vote illegally this bill isn't motivated so much by our reaction to voting laws passed by republican states it's a bill that reflects hostility toward republicans themselves now look let's be very frank about what it would do setting aside for a moment all the other policy and constitutional issues the constitutional issues ranging from federalism to the first amendment and a lot of stuff in between set those aside for just a second think about the policy implications of the federal government funding campaigns for federal office that means they'll be spending millions of dollars per race and that means not everyone can be a candidate so they'll have to decide which candidates are legitimate and which are not which will receive funding and which are not we've seen throughout human history and and especially in modern times what happens in governments when they hold elections but the government decides who's on the ballot so too when governments fund campaigns that's a a way one way or another of preferring certain candidates over others that threatens the very fabric upon which our system of government is based it's simply intolerable this is deeply partisan it's problematic it's cost unconstitutional in lots and lots of ways and we should not pass it this so-called reform bill is anything but reform in the house and the senate the only bipartisanship is the opposition to it we have a lot of serious things that senator schumer could be bringing to the floor right now this is nothing but a power grab for democrats to stay in control voter integrity election integrity is a serious serious issue and it should be bipartisan we all should be striving to get there this is not bipartisan it is wrong and i fully oppose this bill i guess i'll wrap up for now um folks i i have a special interest in this i served as the montgomery county auditor in iowa and in iowa our county auditors are the commissioners of elections and i fully believe that our state and local officials are the ones that should be running our election systems not our federal government what we see with s1 is what it would do it would federalize our election system one it would turn the fec into a political weapon two legalize ballot harvesting that is not good uh three it would force americans to fund campaigns just as you have seen here or heard here it is really welfare for politicians what a great bill huh um it would also prohibit common sense voter id laws iowa does have a voter id law and you know what our voter participation has only gone up since we put voter id laws into place it's hardly voter suppression and you know what iowa does if you don't have a government-issued id you can't afford the six dollars to get one we provide you with one free of charge okay so it's not suppressing the vote americans support voter id they are against this s-1 bill the fund the politicians act is what i call it it's not a for the people act it is welfare for politicians great thanks thank you joni um so senator schumer has decided to put s1 on the floor next week it will be a a show vote uh it's designed uh purely and simply to score political points nothing more nothing less and if you look at the provisions of the bill and i know there you you've heard my colleagues talk about some of them but you know getting rid of photo id is just a really bad idea if you're thinking about election integrity republicans democrats and independents all believe that it's important that you have an id to vote 34 states have adopted that kind of a provision under this bill it would eliminate south dakota's photo id for people who want to get an absentee ballot we were one of the first states in the country to adopt photo id this would completely violate and eviscerate state sovereignty when it comes to elections which is something that the constitution calls for another provision the bill which i think is just outrageous as joni alluded to is the fact that you would have the federal government the federal taxpayers basically subsidizing candidates around this country and if the example hasn't been used already ted cruz pointed out in the first quarter of this year that the taxpayers would be cutting him a check for 30 million dollars you can get up to 80 million in the state of texas you can get up to 56 million i should say 80 million in the state of california 56 in the million in the state of texas and even in my state of south dakota the taxpayers in my race would have to pay me 7.6 million or up to 15 million dollars for the state i mean this stuff is just nonsense it's crazy and it needs to be defeated and i hope next week when this show vote comes up that the democrats in the senate who clearly hopefully are wise enough to understand what this means for elections in this country and if you don't believe it look at all the secretaries of state and uh election officials across the country who have weighed in and said there's no way they could implement this but it does completely federalize nationalized and bureaucracy bureaucratize our elections in this country and and that would be a really bad outcome in terms of uh the american people the american voters who right now need an id to get on a plane need an id to drive a car need an id to get into some government buildings in fact need an id to get on some scooters in this country and we're going to tell people that that they don't need an id to vote i think that's a that's an idea it's a really bad idea and it needs to be rejected next week and rejected soundly the guy who gets the big check the corrupt politicians act is the single most dangerous piece of legislation pending in the united states congress it is a brazen power grab it is an attempt by democrats to federalize elections and to ensure that democrats cannot lose for the next hundred years it is not about protecting the right to vote it is about taking away the right to vote from the citizens and giving it instead to the corrupt politicians in washington the corrupt politicians act would strike down virtually every common sense voter integrity law adopted by the states across the country 29 states have adopted voter id laws reasonable common sense steps to protect the integrity of elections the corrupt politicians act would repeal all of those voter id laws 31 states prohibit ballot harvesting the corrupt practice of paying political operatives to collect other people's ballots that invites voter fraud what does the corrupt politicians act do it strikes down every one of those laws and mandates ballot harvesting nationwide the corrupt politicians act would automatically register to vote anyone who comes into contact with the government that means if you get a dmv if you go to the dmv that means if you get an unemployment check if you get a welfare check if you go to a public college or university it automatically registers you to vote that is intended to and would in fact register millions of illegal aliens to vote now the democrats claim that's not their intention at all except the bill explicitly provides that the millions of illegal aliens who are registered to vote and the people who register them shall not be liable for illegally registering to vote not only that many states have reasonable restrictions on felons and criminals voting the corrupt politicians act strikes down all of those restrictions and mandates instead that all felons be allowed to vote beyond that this bill is welfare for politicians this bill is designed to give hundreds of millions of dollars to corrupt incumbent politicians to keep them in power and this is not about the right to vote when you have millions of illegal aliens registered to vote when you have felons registered to vote when you're inviting voter fraud through striking down photo id laws through striking down ballot harvesting laws what you're doing is stealing the right to vote from legal citizens this is brazen it's cynical and it's worth noting that when republicans had the white house in both houses of congress we didn't try this we didn't try to rig the system so that our side could never lose an election this is an abuse of power from the democrats and i got to say at least so far the media has not covered even a fraction of the brazen abuse that is reflected in this bill well good afternoon everybody i think our goal has always been to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat easier to vote and harder to cheat when you eliminate voter id it makes it easier to cheat when you promote ballot harvesting it makes it easier to cheat i think ballot harvesting eliminating voter id decreases the value of what we have for this great republic the opportunity to get out and and vote so i think that this power this power grab the nancy pelosi power grab act is destined for failure i sure encourage our friends across the aisle to stand firm as well and help us keep the filibuster in place so this legislation doesn't pass and then again just close by saying again we want to make sure it's easier to vote and harder to cheat all right couple questions i'm going to have to go vote this second time later schumer and vice president harris meeting with texas lawmakers this week well i think it's an example of how democrats are trying to politicize this issue you know the rhetoric that joe biden has used the rhetoric that kamala harris has used is disgraceful they have called common sense steps to enhance voter integrity to enhance election integrity they've called that jim crow 2.0 and that that language is designed to be fear-mongering now it's worth remembering what jim crow 1.0 it was jim crow 1.0 were laws written by democratic politicians and 100 of those laws were written by democrats in office designed to prevent the voters from ever voting the democrats in office out of office jim crow was an abomination and i got to say if you want to talk about what is jim crow 2.0 it is the corrupt politicians act it actually has the identical purpose this is democrats in office that don't want the voters to be able to vote them out and so they're trying to rig the system to steal the right to vote from legal voters and so the degree of demagoguery we're seeing from senate democrats screaming the georgia act is jim crow the texas act is jim crow when they don't know what's in the bill they don't care what's in the bill because it's all designed to try to herd people into voting for the corrupt politicians act here in washington and that would profoundly undermine the integrity of our elections you know the last serious examination of voter fraud was in 2004 the carter baker commission chaired by president jimmy carter a democrat and former secretary of state james baker a republican now by any measure jimmy carter is not some crazy right-wing kook the carter baker commission concluded that voter fraud is real that it is a problem that is persistent that we need to take steps to deal with it what did the carter baker commission recommend it recommended voter id it recommended eliminating ballot harvesting and identified ballot harvesting as the greatest opportunity for voter fraud what does the corrupt politicians act do it literally takes the recommendations of the carter baker commission where is fraud most likely and it expands all of them now look in law and in life there's a reasonable inference that people intend the consequences of your actions when you look at the recommendations from a serious bipartisan commission on voter fraud about how to combat voter fraud you do exactly the opposite the natural inference is the authors of this bill want there to be more voter fraud they know ballot harvesting invites wide scale fraud but cynically they believe it benefits their partisan interest i think that's really unfortunate anything else yeah right here i get the sense that you're no one on s1 after this um i'm curious are there places where you see you can work with democrats in the white house to pass something perhaps not on voting rights but more generally well you know this bill doesn't do anything that previous federal laws have done where they expanded the people who could vote by age by sex by race this doesn't make it more possible for people to vote frankly it makes it more possible for people to diminish the vote of voters who should be legally voting in in that election so i don't think so i think from my point as a former chief election official as a former local election official uh the the premise is important that states and local governments have not only responsibility but they have incredible accountability to the people that they work for to be sure that elections are fair that they're free that there's no question about the outcome and so you know anything that involves the federal government in that process i'd be opposed to so it wouldn't matter if it was a degree of federal involvement or total federal involvement i'd still think that was not the right place for the federal government to be yes well it's a it's a separate question this speaker says it won't be ready in her view till the fall for reasons i don't really understand unless they want to totally separate that discussion from this effort to frankly do everything they've wanted to do for 20 years rolled up now into one big bill to give them an advantage i voted for the voting rights act to extend it in the past there are any number of circumstances where i could vote to extend it in the future but that's a that's a second vote uh not a vote that the democrats want to talk about right now yes do you worry at all that the former president's repeated statements that the election was stolen that it was the greatest crime in the century has contributed to kind of an arms race on who can change election rules fastest to try to benefit one side well you know the other side said that repeatedly after the 2016 elections crime of the century i heard that more times in the uh in the investigation we did in intel no but in the context of what happened you know there's always a different reason for them to want to do this after the 2016 election we needed to change all the laws to put the federal government in control because voters weren't votes the voting system wasn't secure enough after the 2020 election there apparently were no security problems anywhere but the voting system and anything any state did to try to beef up their security concerns was suppression of the vote there was a this has gone on for 20 years now since 2001. if you go back and look what democrats were introducing in 2001 a lot of that is in this bill now they weren't quite brazen enough to say we should get six dollars for every dollar that anybody contributes under two hundred dollars they weren't quite to the point that they would say and by the way anybody that wants to collect your ballot should be able to collect it and they should be able to deliver it or not how do you know if you give your ballot to somebody that they put it in the mail for you or not how do you know that they took it to the courthouse or not particularly on the mail you just failed some some ballots you are given as a ballot harvester happen to get in the mail and others maybe don't but you can always say they got lost in the mail it is an extreme position on their part they know it they do anything they could to get this bill passed and i think they will not get it passed we'll go right here and then there um well we all i think every one of us looks for opportunities to work with senator manchin and we found those opportunities i actually think when stacey abrams immediately endorsed senator manchin's proposal it became the stacey abrams substitute not the joe manchin substitute yes i'm wondering this was not right now it's a lot of folks have left but at the outset a real show of force against this bill is it because you're worried about mansion's movement and and the messaging on this no i think do they support these measures uh getting money out of politics um preventing foreign interference and election if the bill itself is popular the bill itself is not popular 78 of americans support for instance voter id at the polls um 69 of african americans support voter id at the polls nobody is forgiving federal money in any significant number of people uh to uh to politicians nobody thinks you should be able to hand your ballot to anybody who says they want to take it i just think it's not a popular bill and we we scheduled this news conference i think about a week ago before there was any any action to talk about your reaction to the supreme court upholding the affordable care act from the judiciary committee what's your reactions and dismissing the challenge to the affordable care act well the affordable care act gets constantly woven deeper and deeper into the system it's eventually going to be pretty hard to unravel from the system the court had a chance to do that today and didn't do it last question given all the talk of a stolen election um what do you why do you think all the republican health legislators rushed um this year to begin changing their election laws what was what was driving them well many of them changed their election laws in the pandemic as they should have to broaden access in ways that had never been broadened before and then they re-evaluated that in missouri they did that but they did it with a end date on the legislation so no criticism in our state that we made it more easy to vote because of the pandemic than ever before but we went back to our normal election laws at the end of that into that process and on the stolen election charge i just think you've got to you've got to remember which stolen election ones that the democrats said that was stolen by the russians and the president and others four years ago or uh or this election which i think had all of the elements of security that local authorities and states can provide and i think they continue to be the best place to provide that security that responsibility and the effort they need to be sure that people have confidence that what happened on election day was what happened senator manchin is under a lot of pressure from the last eliminated filibuster are you worried that by flatly rejecting all of the proposals even something more narrow well first of all the the bill they filed is not center mansion's bill it's another 800-page bill that senator klobuchar wanted the committee to vote out but the committee didn't vote any bill out at all and there that is not their proposal now they're desperate to pass any of these elements they can but i i think that the country understands what's happening here as we talk about it and i think more importantly republican senators understand what's happening let me make one quick observation on that you talked about how this was a show of force one of the reasons is the press coverage so far of this bill has been virtually non-existent you're right if you do polling on do you support protecting the right to vote i'm amazed that's not 100 protecting the right to vote is a wonderful thing you know if you also do polling on do you support the fuzzy kittens and puppy law that has really good support in the polls too if you actually ask people about what is in this bill it is incredibly unpopular democrats don't want to talk about getting rid of voter id because 70 to 80 percent of americans supported a majority of democrats supported a majority of african-americans supported they don't want to talk about that democrats don't want to talk about getting rid of the ballot harvesting laws because people recognize that invites corruption when you have ballot harvesting you get a paid operative from the dnc who goes in to say a nursing home and collects dozens or hundreds of ballots some of whom some of which are from people who may not be competent to vote and the reason it invites frauds is they're sitting right there and if that person votes the wrong way there's nothing to stop an unscrupulous operative from just throwing that ballot in the trash can and only mailing in the votes that vote the way they want that's why jimmy carter said ballot harvesting invites voter fraud and i will say in terms of press coverage i saw a recent analysis that that that the corporate media has covered the georgia and texas laws and the allegations that their voter suppression laws which is complete nonsense more than 10 times as much as the corporate media has covered this brazen national power grab from the democrats and i get it doesn't fit fit an attractive political narrative for what many in the media want but you want to know just how brazen this power grab is i'll point you to one provision just in closing from the day it was created the federal election commission has been bipartisan federal election commission was created in the wake of watergate in the wake of political scandal you had democrats in total control they could have created a partisan agency but they did they didn't do that they created an agency with three republicans three democrats because they recognized if you're gonna administer federal elections it should be fair and bipartisan what does the corrupt politicians act do it turns it into a partisan agency it makes it three democrats and two republicans what would happen if they did that just ask yourself if chuck schumer had the ability to investigate any senate candidate he wanted to have the fec sue any senate candidate he wanted to have the fec fine any senate candidate he wanted it was a straight partisan commission it's not hard to see how that is nothing but a weapon i promise you every republican senator would be investigated would be fine and it would all happen in october right before the election that's wrong and let's be clear when republicans had majorities we didn't say let's make the federal election commission a republican commission to go investigate and prosecute the democrats this is a power grab and i think the press has an obligation to cover it fairly and tell the american people what's in this bill all right thank you

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Published: Thu Jun 17 2021