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.
“VOTING RIGHTS” mentioning Mitch McConnell was published in the Senate section on pages S5115-S5116 on July 28.
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.
Senators' salaries are historically higher than the median US income.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
VOTING RIGHTS
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, now on a different matter, the massive, 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 pricetag. It is 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 are talking about amnesty for illegal immigrants, socialist price-fixing that would leave us with fewer new prescription drugs, fewer new treatments, and fewer new cures.
They want to permanently change the child tax credit into welfare with no--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. I thought we just had that debate a couple of weeks ago.
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--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 is absolutely 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 comparison to Jim Crow segregation and all kinds of other horrors have continued apace.
To provide a little more context about 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
``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,'' other democracies around the world.
``If Georgia's elections are undemocratic, then almost all of our democratic allies are also undemocratic.''
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 would be busy trying to divest from most of our NATO allies and essentially the rest of the entire 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--not a one. Bring on the boycotts, I guess.
And you don't even want to hear about early voting. Goodness gracious. But France, Spain, Germany, Italy, the UK, Ireland--not a day of in-person early voting in any of those countries, none of them. That is according to an international NGO that studies democracy.
So, remember, the Texas and Georgia laws codify a whole lot of early voting, 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. What nonsense.
Even going by Texas's new proposals, there will be voting by mail in Paris, TX, but not in Paris, France. There would be almost 2 weeks of in-person early voting in New Berlin, TX, but zero days in Berlin, Germany. I am sure Democrats will be yelling at the Fortune 500 to boycott Europe any day now--any day now.
Of course, the reality is that these moving goalposts are absolutely fake. The frantic outrage is phony. It is 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.
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