Republican senator accuses opposition to GOP’s restrictive voting laws of playing ‘race card’

Republican US Senator John Cornyn has accused opponents of restrictive voting laws filed by GOP lawmakers across the country of invoking the “race card” as voting rights advocates warn of their disproportionate impacts to voters of colour.

“Once you play the race card, it’s hard for people to think clearly because it tugs at our emotions,” the senator from Texas said in a floor speech on Wednesday.

“It tugs at our collective, frankly, guilt, emanating from the earliest days of country that we’ve come a long way to try to rectify,” he said.

He accused opponents of spreading “propaganda” by characterising GOP-sponsored bills – drafted by a right-wing think tank in the wake of Republican losses and Donald Trump’s spurious legal effort to toss out millions of ballots – as a voter suppression campaign.

His remarks come as Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer intends to bring the For The People Act, a sweeping voting rights and elections ethics bill, to the Senate floor for a vote, despite opposition from Republicans as well as centrist Democrat Joe Manchin.

Voting rights advocates and civil rights groups have argued that the current effort to restrict access to the ballot follows a legacy of political manoeuvres that have undermined Black voters, from a turbulent Reconstruction era in the aftermath of the Civil War to Jim Crow and discrimination culminating in the passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

A US Supreme Court decision in 2013 overturned key elements of that law, effectively eliminating requirements that districts with histories of racial discrimination at the ballot box get federal approval, or “preclearance”, before changing their election laws.

Republican lawmakers in several states have filed or signed into law sweeping measures that impose strict voter ID requirements, eliminate wider availability of mail-in ballots and ballot drop-boxes, and criminalise handing out food and water in long lines at the polls.

Dozens of proposals also would hand over elections authority to partisan officials in GOP-dominated legislatures rather than elections officials.

The For The People Act proposes automatic voter registration, at least 15 consecutive days of early voting for federal elections, and mail-in voting and drop boxes for absentee ballots, among a host of other proposals wrapped into the bill.

It would also make it more difficult to purge voters from voter rolls, restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated people, end partisan gerrymandering, and tackle campaign finance reform to expose “dark money” groups backing elected officials and their campaigns.

Democrats have also urged Congress to pass a renewal of the Voting Rights Act, to be named honour of late congressman and civil rights figure John Lewis – a measure supported by Senator Manchin and Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski.

That measure would restore elements to the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court.

Senator Mitch McConnell has called the proposal “unnecessary.”

In remarks on the Senate floor on Wednesday, the GOP Minority Leader accused Democrats of seeking to “tip the scales of our electoral system permanently in their favour,” appearing to levy the same criticism against Democrats that his party and disenfranchisement campaigns have faced for decades.

Senator Cornyn also opposed the John Lewis bill in his remarks, adding that voting rights proposals “are about unconstitutionally seizing power and never letting go.”