‘This is not America’: Senate Democrats slam GOP voting restrictions at Georgia hearing

In a rare hearing outside of Washington DC, a panel of Democratic senators and Georgia lawmakers took aim at the state’s sweeping, Republican-sponsored voting law that restricts access to the ballot and hands more election authority to GOP lawmakers.

The Senate Rules Committee – holding its first field hearing in 20 years – convened in Atlanta at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights on 19 July as a forceful rebuke of the law and to lobby support for a pair of voting rights bills that Senate Republicans have vowed to block.

The Georgia legislation was among nearly 400 bills introduced in nearly every state within the first months of 2021, buoyed by Donald Trump’s “stolen election” narrative under the guise of preserving “election integrity” and “voter confidence” despite overwhelming turnout and no widespread evidence of fraud in 2020 elections.

Republican leaders in at least 17 states have enacted at least 28 new laws that make voting more difficult.

In an interview with NBC News before the hearing, committee chair Amy Klobuchar called GOP proposals “absurd”, adding, “This is not America.”

“So much progress that Americans have sought for … that Americans have died for, is at stake,” she said in her opening remarks, which traced the violent history of the civil rights movement and the events of Bloody Sunday in 1965, when activist and future congressman John Lewis led 600 civil rights marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where they were brutally attacked by police.

She criticised the Georgia law as “a blatant exercise of raw power” and part of a “coordinated effort to limit Americans’ freedom to vote.”

“We must meet this moment,” she said. “That is why we’re here.”

The nation living in the “great house” built by democracy “is on fire,” said Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock.

“The fight for voting rights is the fight for human rights,” he said. “There’s nothing more noble, more important for us to do in a moment like this. … We can pass legislation that can create uniform national standards so your right to vote cannot be challenged. We can create a baseline for voting. Basic standards that apply no matter what state you live in.”

No Republican senators on the committee attended the hearing.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a member of the committee, called the hearing a “silly stunt” amplifying Democrats “phony hysteria” over Republican lawmakers’ nationwide attempts to restrict ballot access.

Georgia lawmakers urged the committee to pass the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act – a restoration of the landmark civil rights law to be named in honour of the late congressman – as an antidote to state-level voting laws.

But against overwhelming GOP resistance and a lack of unanimous Democratic support for amending filibuster rules that have allowed Republican blockades of their agenda, it is unclear what the path to their passage looks like.

“We desperately need your help,” Georgia state Senator Sally Harrell told the committee.

“But there’s no one solution to this problem, and it’s not a static thing where you’re going to be able to pass one bill and solve it all, because the methods keep changing,” she said.

While Republicans restrict mail-in ballot access and winnow early voting hours after ballots cast by mail helped boost turnout in 2020 elections during the coronavirus pandemic, a parallel effort from GOP lawmakers has seen more than 200 bills in 41 states to give themselves more authority over the electoral process.

At least 24 of those bills have been signed into law – including in Georgia.

The Georgia elections law rolls back mail-in ballot options and early voting in larger counties and criminalises handing out food and water at the polls, among other measures.

It also would give the state’s Republican-dominated legislature more control over the state’s election board and empower lawmakers to suspend elections officials.

Georgia Democratic state Rep Billy Mitchell said those proposals would create “cheating umpires” who would then install “political appointees whose only concern is the person who appointed them.”

To counter those proposals, Senator Warnock has introduced the Preventing Election Subversion Act, which would ban “arbitrary and unfounded” removals of election officials and allow them to petition federal authorities for redress if they are subjected to removal proceedings.

It also would make it a federal crime to threaten or intimidate election workers, as GOP proposals could also embolden partisan poll watchers to harass them, and mandate “buffer zones” around them.

The hearing in Georgia follows the arrival of a group of Texas Democratic state lawmakers who left the state in a last-ditch effort to block passage of similarly restrictive voting laws in their state.

While in Washington DC, those lawmakers are lobbying members of Congress and the White House to pass federal voting rights measures.

In an impassioned address from Philadelphia last week, President Joe Biden called GOP proposals that give election authority to Republican lawmakers “election subversion” and “the most dangerous threat to voting.”

“It’s hard to declare how critical this is. It’s simply unconscionable,” he said.

Despite calling those threats a defining battle of his presidency, the president has not publicly made the case to Democratic senators – including prominent holdouts like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema – to amend or abolish the current filibuster rules that have undermined his agenda.