WASHINGTON – At the weekly Republican leadership press conference today, U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.), the top Republican on the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, continued pushing back on Democrats’ election takeover. Blunt highlighted how Democrats have, from one election cycle to the next, reinvented their justification for federalizing elections, this time relying on a false narrative that states are making it harder to vote when, in fact, they’re making it easier.
CLICK HERE to Watch Blunt’s Remarks
Following Are Blunt’s Remarks:
“Well, I think the Democrats are about to make the same mistake with the election law that they did with the spending spree.
“You know, the reckless spending bill was basically everything Democrats had ever wanted to do in terms of interjecting the government into activities of everyday life in ways that the government hasn’t been before.
“With the elections bill, there’s always a reason for [this] federal takeover of the election. End of the ‘16 election cycle, at the very last minute, Democrats decided they wanted to make the election structure part of the essential, critical services of the country in a way that would allow Democrats to take over something that states had run for 200 years and to make it more federal in nature.
“H.R. 1, passed before the 2020 election, was renewed right after the 2020 election. But suddenly, the reason for H.R. 1 was everything that happened on Election Day in 2020.
“I think we’re going to find that what happened after Election Day in 2020 is states that had been appropriately forward-leaning, in what was the first pandemic election in 100 years, changed their laws for that election with the idea that they’d go back and look at it after the election.
“Almost all of them did. Some states, like Missouri, changed their laws for that election, and the law said, ‘when the election is over, the changes are over.’ No criticism for Missouri when they did that.
“Other states changed their law and went back and looked at the changes they made and decided how many of them they wanted to make permanent. Of the states that Democrats are complaining about, I can’t find one of them that doesn’t have an easier process for elections in 2021 than they had in 2018. Maybe not as easy as 2020, but there was a pandemic.
“You know, my mother used to say that no good deed goes unpunished. Legislators did exactly what you would hope they would do, which was lean forward in an extraordinary moment and review that afterwards.
“I think they’d be pretty hesitant to do that the next time there’s an extraordinary moment because, apparently, you don’t have the ability to go back and say, ‘okay, what worked well in a pandemic that would also work appropriately in a normal cycle?’
“Don’t believe this idea that all of these states have changed their laws to make it harder to vote. All of these states have changed their laws in a way that makes it easier to vote than it was in any other election than the pandemic election, and we’ll be talking about that over the next few days.”