Sen. Raphael Warnock, whose election as Georgia’s first Black senator helped hand control of the chamber to Democrats, used his first floor speech on Capitol Hill to blast a wave of Republican-backed measures that would make it harder to cast ballots in states around the country.
Warnock noted Georgia’s and the country’s history of allowing voter suppression against minorities and the poor, and he warned that some Republican lawmakers are trying to reopen those chapters with “draconian” restrictions he cast as a reaction against Democratic victories like his.
“We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights and voter access unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era,” Warnock said Wednesday. “One person, one vote is being threatened right now. Politicians in my home state and all across America, in their craven lust for power, have launched a full-fledged assault on voting rights” and on “democracy itself.”
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