Cruz Unloads On Democrats’ Election Bill: Schumer ‘Inadvertently’ Is ‘Right,’ This Is Jim Crow 2.0

I rise today to celebrate a win for the country. Today, the United States rightly failed to advance the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act,’ meaning that this bill will not come to the Senate floor for a final vote. This is a huge win for the citizens of the United States. This is a huge win for democracy, and it’s a huge win for the integrity of our elections. The ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ is the most dangerous legislation we’ve considered in the Senate in the nine years I’ve served in this body. It’s an attempt by Senate Democrats at a brazen power grab. It’s an attempt by Democrats to federalize elections and to ensure that Democrats won’t lose control for the next 100 years. This bill isn’t about protecting the right to vote. It’s precisely the opposite. It’s about taking away the right to vote from the citizens and giving it instead to the corrupt politicians in Washington who want to stay in power. 

The ‘Corrupt Politicians Act,’ would strike down virtually every commonsense voter integrity law adopted by states across the country. Thirty-six states have adopted voter ID laws, a reasonable and commonsense step to protect the integrity of elections that over 70 percent of Americans support and over 60 percent of African Americans support. In fact, recent polling now shows support for voter ID at over 80 percent, thanks no doubt to the relentless assault on voter ID mounted by Senate Democrats. The ‘Corrupt Politicians Act,’ would repeal the vast majority of these voter ID laws. Likewise, 31 states prohibit ballot harvesting, the corrupt practice of paying political operatives to collect other people’s ballots. So what would ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ do? It would strike down all of those laws in 31 states and would mandate ballot harvesting nationwide. It would mean that paid political operatives from the Democratic National Committee could go to nursing homes and collect a vote. Some of those votes no doubt from individuals who may be no longer competent to make a decision. The reason 31 states have acted to ban ballot harvesting is because it invites voter fraud. An unscrupulous operative can fill out the ballot for a senior citizen who no longer has the capacity for make a decision, and if that citizen has the temerity to vote in the way the operative doesn’t like, there’s nothing to prevent the operative from throwing that ballot in the mail and simply not sending it in, only sending in the ballots that happen to comply with their own political preference.

If you care even one wit about election integrity, striking down every prohibition on ballot harvesting is precisely the wrong step to take. The ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ would also automatically register to vote anyone who comes in contact with the government. So if you get a welfare check, if you get an unemployment check, get a driver’s license, if you go to a state college or state university, you’re automatically registered to vote. What’s the problem with that? The problem with that is that the authors of the bill know is that would register millions of illegal aliens to vote. Millions of illegal aliens come into contact with the government and automatic registration is designed to register millions of illegal aliens. How do we know this? We know this among other things because the bill explicitly immunizes the state officials who would be registering illegal aliens to vote. It grants a safe harbor and says when you illegally register illegal aliens, you’ll have no liability. If you care about the integrity of elections, registering millions of illegal aliens to dilute and steal the votes of legal American citizens is exactly the opposite way to go. 

Not only that, many states have reasonable restrictions on felons and on criminals voting. What does the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ do? It strikes all of those down and instead mandates that all felons should be allowed to vote. Murderers, rapists, child molesters all allowed to vote because Democrats have made the cynical calculation that if millions of illegal aliens are allowed to vote and millions of criminals and felons are allowed to vote, that those individuals are likely to vote Democrat, and Democrats want to stay in power.

The bill also prevents states from correcting voter roles and from removing people who passed away. You can’t go in when someone is dead and say, you know, dead people shouldn’t be voting. No, this bill mandates leave the dead people on the rolls, another step designed to invite fraud. Moreover, the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ is welfare for politicians. This bill is designed to give hundreds of millions of dollars every year to corrupt incumbent politicians to keep them in power. It matches for contributions under $200 6-1 federal funds so that the members of this body would receive collectively over a billion dollars in federal funds to stay in power. That’s great if you’re a corrupt politician who wants to prevent a challenger from ever defeating you and if you want to prevent the voters from making a different choice, then you flood them with federal funds to make it so you can’t beat corrupt incumbents. But that’s not what you do if you want to protect the right to vote.

This bill is brazen. It is so brazen that the joke really is admitted in one provision of the bill. The Federal Elections Commission was created in the wake of Watergate, designed to protect integrity in our elections. It was from the beginning designed to be bipartisan. Three Republicans, three Democrats, because Congress recognized that a partisan Federal Elections Commission would be deeply injurious to our democracy. That to have a Federal Elections Commission with any integrity, it needed to be bipartisan, which means you needed a bipartisan majority to act in order to ensure that neither party weaponizes the federal election laws. What does the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ do? It turns the Federal Election Commission into a partisan body, shifts it from three Republicans and three Democrats, to three Democrats and two Republicans. It turns it into an arm of the Democratic Senate Committee in effect. Nothing in this bill is as cynical as that provision. We’re in a 50-50 senate. We have close elections in this race.

Mr. President, you’re a sophisticated political player. I want you to ask for a second, in a close election, in the weeks before the election, if the Senate Majority Leader had the ability to launch investigations from the Federal Elections Commission, to bring prosecutions from the Federal Elections Commission, to sue the political opponents of the majority, how much would that invite abuse? I understand right now Democrats are in power of both houses of Congress and the White House. Power can be intoxicating. But I do want to point out it wasn’t that long ago, Mr. President, you and I were both in this body four years ago when there was a Republican president and a Republican House and a Republican Senate. You didn’t see the Republican majority try anything as brazen as the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act.’ You didn’t see a Republican majority trying to rig the game, trying to change the rules so that Republicans could never be defeated in the next election. You didn’t see the Republican majority trying to turn the Federal Election Commission into a partisan weapon.

I ask you, Mr. President, what level of comfort would you have as an elected Democrat if Mitch McConnell had control of the Federal Election Commission, if it were Republican partisan agency. I think you would be entirely justified in being concerned that it would be used as a political weapon to hurt you. Your last election was a relatively close election. Imagine two weeks before the election if a Republican Federal Election Commission [announced] sweeping investigation into massive campaign finance violations by the incumbent senator who happened to be of the party that was out of power. You would rightly feel that was grotesquely unfair, and yet that’s what every Senate Democrat just voted to create. 

You know, the most pernicious aspect of this bill has been the racial demagoguery that it has invited. We’ve heard the Senate Majority Leader invoke in booming terms specters from our sorry history of racial discrimination in the past. The Senate Majority Leader has used the phrase Jim Crow 2.0 repeatedly, as has the President of the United States, as has the Vice President of the United States, deliberately inflaming racial tensions, suggesting that laws, commonsense voter integrity laws in states like Georgia and Texas, things like requiring voter ID or requiring signature verification and absentee ballots are somehow a modern manifestation of Jim Crow. That is a grotesque lie, and Mr. President, the majority leader knows that. The President of the United States knows that. The Vice President of the United States. They know they’re lying. But ironically, they’ve inadvertently said something that is accurate about this piece of legislation. Jim Crow legislation was grotesque and ugly. It was legislation that was drafted without exception by Democratic politicians. Jim Crow was written by Democratic politicians, and its purpose, when the Jim Crow laws were written, were to prevent the voters from ever voting out of office Democratic politicians. One of the ugliest chapters of our nation’s history. And thankfully, we repudiated Jim Crow. Well, the majority leader used the phrase Jim Crow 2.0 and inadvertently he’s right, but not about what he’s describing. He’s right about the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act.’ The ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ follows the exact same pattern that Jim Crow did. It is partisan legislation written by elected Democrats, designed to keep elected Democrats in office and to steal the right to vote from the citizenry to decide on somebody else.

Democracy is too important for that, and the kind of cynical, racial demagoguery we’ve seen around this bill while ignoring the substance of it, and I will point out the media has been eager to ignore the substance of it. The media says should we protect the right to vote? Yes, we should protect the right to vote. This bill takes away your right to vote. This bill is designed to prevent the voters from choosing to throw the bums out, the most fundamental right of any voter to throw the bums out whether they’re one side or the other side. We the people have sovereignty, and this bill, the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ was designed to take that power from the people and give it to the politicians in Washington. Today was a victory. It was a victory for the American people, a victory for democracy. It was a victory for the Constitution and a victory for the rule of law.”