The Senate Judiciary Committee’s show hearing this week laughably labeled as “Protecting Voting Rights in America” accomplished two things: It reminded us that what Democrats are really interested in protecting is their power, and that the American left still wants to party like it’s 1965.
Oh, one other thing: Sen. Ted Cruz ate Sen. Dick Durbin’s lunch.
The “Voter Suppression” Show, sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, and his fellow Dems, used much of the nearly three-hour hearing to tell whoever was watching that Republicans abhor democracy and to campaign for November.
They certainly weren’t in it because they believe their John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — an anti-states rights monstrosity of a proposal — has any hope of becoming law this year. The bill, which in part demands once again that states seek Justice Department approval for voting law changes such as ID requirements, has no chance of moving in the Republican-controlled House or the higher-threshold Senate.
But Durbin and crew put on quite a performance in trying to convince Americans that their democracy is imperiled by election integrity.
“It’s time for us to establish the right to vote in this country, and those who would take that right would have to pay a price in answering to not only the judgment of history but their peers at this time in history,” said Durbin in his serious, sinister voice. Remember, this is the same guy who argued for a national litmus test to define “legitimate” journalism.
Establish the right to vote? What year does he think this is? Durbin and crew would have you believe that Bull Connor is standing behind every street corner with a firehose and a German Shepherd to suppress the vote.
By the way, here’s a little inconvenient truth for these self-righteous defenders of democracy. Bull Connor was a Democrat, as Cruz, R-Texas, reminded Durbin and the 2024 Dems in his spanking of the hypocritical left.
“Contrary to the prevailing Democrat narrative happily repeated by the corporate media that Republican-sponsored legislation would herald a return to Jim Crow —I would note, by the way, Jim Crow laws were drafted by Democrats to ensure the voters could only elect Democrats — the reality is the majority of Americans support election integrity that projects the right to vote,” the senator said.
Election law expert Hans von Spakovsky drilled that point home during his testimony before the august committee.
Voter ID Is Not Voter Suppression
Asked if voter ID laws disenfranchise voters, as many on the left insist, von Spakovsky pointed to multiple studies showing the laws do no such thing. Included in the findings is a 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research report titled, “Strict ID Laws Don’t Stop Voters: Evidence from a Nationwide Panel, 2008-2018.” The findings are summed up in the title, but here’s a little more for the doubting Dicks of the liberal political world.
“U.S. states increasingly require identification to vote – an ostensive attempt to deter fraud that prompts complaints of selective disenfranchisement. Using a difference-in-differences design on a 1.6-billion-observations panel dataset, 2008–2018, we find that the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation,” the report states.
Democrats wail that several states have enacted “restrictive” voter ID laws since a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down the DOJ’s power of preclearance of state voter laws. Von Spakovsky testified that the states in question had registration rates close to or exceeding the national rate. All of them perform better than leftist enclaves California and New York, including in the registration and turnout of black voters.
The 2020 election had the highest voter turnout in decades. U.S. Census Bureau data show 67 percent of voting-age citizens voted, up 5 percent since the 2016 election, with 73 percent registering to vote. That’s not a mark of voter suppression.
“The claim that there’s a wave of voter suppression in the country that requires expansion of the Voting Rights Act [of 1965] is simply false,” said von Spakovsky Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. “Efforts to enhance the integrity of elections through reforms such as voter ID, and improvements to the accuracy of voter registration lists are not voter suppression.”
‘An Irony’
What Durbin’s dog-and-pony show was really all about was giving Democrats ample time to define former President Donald Trump as an insurrectionist who should be in prison — not the White House. Blowhard Georgia U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is serving in the Senate thanks to some gaping holes in Georgia’s election integrity Maginot Line, spoke of that “infamous period where the former president was hellbent” on overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Cruz again put the Democrats’ “context “ into context. He noted the hearing was quickly called in the wake of President Joe Biden’s “partisan, angry, bitter, divisive” State of the Union address in which the Democrat plugged the Lewis Act. He pointed to the real election suppressionists, the Democrats who sought to disenfranchise millions of voters in Colorado, Maine, and Illinois in their unconstitutional quest to remove Trump from the Republican primary ballot.
“Democrats are not interested in election integrity, they are interested in power, power by any means necessary,” Cruz said. “There’s an irony. Today, Democrats love to beat their chest and say they are defending democracy. And yet all across the country we see Democrat courts and Democrat officials who have been trying to throw Donald Trump off the ballot because nothing protects democracy like preventing the voters from voting for your opponent.”
Dems just want to go back to a simpler time — like the early 1960s when party stalwarts like Bull Connor were doing all they could to “save democracy.”
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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