By Jack Davis | The Western Journal
Senate Democrats hoping to open debate on the so-called
For the People Act needed 60 votes to overcome the GOP’s use of the filibuster.
Instead, they fell 10 short with the evenly divided
chamber going 50-50 on the debate.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who shows up to preside
when her tie-breaking vote can help Democrats ram through legislation, was in
attendance but could do nothing to stop the bill’s defeat.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who in
the course of the day’s flow of vitriol called former President Donald Trump “a petulant child,” said that defying the Democrats was “a
partisan blockade of a pressing issue here in the United States Senate. An
issue no less fundamental than the right to vote,” according to an official transcript.
“Because of one
man’s lie, Republicans are now doing the dastardly act of taking away voting
from millions of Americans … making it much harder for them to vote, and many,
many, many will not,” Schumer said, referring to Trump’s allegations that the
November presidential election was stolen from him.
However, Senate Republicans made it clear that their
opposition to the bill was not rooted in their defense of Trump but in
revulsion to the stench of the bill.
“This is an extraordinarily cynical bill, in my opinion,
even by Washington standards. It’s very ruthless, even by Washington
standards,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said Tuesday on Fox News.
“Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and Senator Schumer call it, I
think, the ‘For The People Act,’ but I think it would be more aptly described
as the Screw the People Act. It will make it much easier to cheat in an
election,” he said.
Kennedy said the proposal “almost guarantees that we’ll
never have another Election Day. We’ll have election months. And I think that
was the genesis of a lot of concern by many people in the last election.”
The power grab nature of the proposal also revolted Republicans, he said.
The Democratic Party’s plan “achieves its purpose by
taking elections, which are governed by the people through their state
legislatures right now, and gives that authority to the federal government,” he
said.
“Now, why anybody would take something that’s working and
give it to the federal government is beyond me. The federal bureaucracy can’t
even stop scam calls or spam calls. But nonetheless, if you turn our voting
procedure over to the federal government, I guarantee you the first thing they
are going to do is get rid of voter ID. And I think most Americans believe that
you should have to prove who you say you are when you go to vote,” Kennedy
said.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has said that bill contained a “rotten core: an
assault on the fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should
decide how to run their own elections.”
In his Tuesday floor remarks before the vote, McConnell
lambasted “Democrats’ transparently partisan plan to tilt every election in
America permanently in their favor. By now, the rotten inner workings of this
power grab have been thoroughly exposed to the light.”
“It’s a recipe for undermining confidence in our
elections. For remaking our entire system of government to suit the preferences
of one far end of the political spectrum,” he said.
McConnell closed by chiding Democrats that using a partisan power grab as a vehicle to change the Senate
rules by eliminating the filibuster would be a mistake.
“And by the way, no matter what far-left activists are
telling our colleagues, this most sensitive subject would not be the best place
to trash the Senate’s rules to ram something through,” the minority leader
said. “In fact, these issues would be the worst possible place to push through
a power grab at any cost.
“The Senate is no obstacle to voting laws done the right
way. I’ve helped write legislation regarding our democracy that has soared
through this chamber on huge bipartisan margins. The Senate is only an obstacle
when the policy is flawed and the process is rotten.”
Jack
Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and
chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he
has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as
well as foreign policy and military issues.
