The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“ELECTION SECURITY” mentioning Mitch McConnell was published in the Senate section on page S4601 on June 17.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
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The publication is reproduced in full below:
ELECTION SECURITY
Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, 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 No. 1 priority for the entire Congress. S. 1 is a bad bill filled with bad ideas, and I have 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 back in 2019. 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 actually 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.
So we are talking about fundamentally the very same bill. And one thing is for certain: Major overhaul doesn't even begin--begin--to describe it. The awful guts are all in there.
There is 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 or bridges, expanding rural broadband, or fighting the opioid epidemic, but just piles of Federal dollars going to yard signs, balloons, and TV ads for candidates at least half of Americans disagree with.
There is 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 is such a radical proposal that even prominent voices on the left have urged caution. Lawyers from ACLU, no less, have sounded the alarm on its proposed encroachment on free speech. One liberal expert went further, saying that if Democrats think their bill is ``essential to secure democracy, they are self-deceived or deceitful.'' And voters themselves are hardly convinced. When asked about election policies like voter ID, large--large--majorities consistently come down on the opposite side of Washington Democrats. The bill is so transparently opportunistic, the Democrats' spin has failed to even unite their own party here in the Senate. It is a massive takeover of our election system with a fill-in-the-blank rationale. Nobody is fooled, and next week, the Senate will reject it
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