On an invitation that was only invited last week, Senator Ted Cruz teamed up with Republican lawmakers to call them to the battle over the issue of suffrage.
Democrats are trying to extend voting rights to “illegal aliens” and “child abusers,” he argued, and Republicans should do everything in their power to stop them. If their far-reaching electoral legislation now works through before the Senate, the IDP will not win elections again for generations, he said.
Asked if there was room to compromise, Cruz was blunt: “No.”
“HR 1’s sole purpose is to ensure that Democrats can never lose an election again, that they will win and retain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of state legislatures for the next century,” Cruz said. told the group. organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business-backed conservative group that provides model legislation to state legislators.
Cruz’s statements, recorded by a person on the call and obtained by The Associated Press, capture the building intensity behind the Republicans’ nationwide campaign to restrict access to the vote. From state houses to Washington, the battle over who can vote and how – often referred to as ‘voting integrity’ – has galvanized a Republican Party in search of a unifying mission in the post-Trump era. For a powerful network of conservatives, voting restrictions are now seen as a political debate over life or death, and the struggle has singled out traditional Republican issues such as abortion, gun rights, and tax cuts as an organizing tool.
That power pulls influential figures and money from right to right, ensuring that the clash over legislation in Washington will be biased and costly.
“It feels like a kind of practical moment for the Conservative movement, when the movement largely realizes that the sanctity of our election is of the utmost importance and the distrust of the voters is at a peak,” said Jessica Anderson, executive chief, said. director of Heritage Action, an influential Conservative advocacy group in Washington. “We had a bit of a cry from the grassroots level and encouraged us to choose this fight.”
Several prominent groups have recently joined the fight: the group against rights against abortion, the Susan B. Anthony List, has teamed up with another conservative Christian group to fund a new organization, the Electoral Transparency Initiative. FreedomWorks, a group set up to push for smaller government, has launched a $ 10 million call for a stricter voting law in the states. It will be run by Cleta Mitchell, a leading Republican lawyer who advises former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Heritage Action has announced a new effort that also focuses on changes in state laws. It included a $ 700,000 advertising campaign to support GOP-written accounts in Georgia, the group’s first blow to advocating for state policy.
So far, the states have been at the center of the debate. More than 250 bills have been tabled in 43 states that would change the way Americans vote, according to a vote by the Brennan Center for Justice, which supports expanded access to suffrage. These include measures that restrict voting by mail, shorten voting hours and the restrictions the Democrats are pushing for amount to the biggest onslaught on voting rights since Jim Crow.
That push was caused by Trump’s lies that he lost the presidential election due to fraud – claims rejected by the courts and prominent Republicans – and the January 6 attack on the US Capitol unleashed by these baseless claims.
But the battle over voting laws now extends far beyond Trump and moves to Washington, where the Democratic Senate will soon consider a variety of vote changes. The package, known as HR 1, requires states to automatically register voters, as well as registration on the same day. This would limit the ability of states to remove registered voters from their roles and restore the voting rights of former criminals. Among dozens of other provisions, it would also require states to present 15 days of early voting and be allowed to vote without apology without voting. Democrats, who use their own resources behind the bill, argue that it is necessary to block what they describe as attempts to oppress voters.
Republicans argue that it is a bag with long-sought-after democratic goals aimed at tipping elections in their favor. Cruz claims that this would lead to millions of “criminals and illegal aliens” voting.
The bill “says that America would be better off if more murderers voted, and that America would be better off if more rapists and child molesters voted,” Cruz said.
He added that he had recently taken part in an all-day strategy call with national conservative leaders to coordinate the opposition. The leaders agreed that the Republicans would try to re-label the bill backed by the Democratic Republic as the “Corrupt Politicians Act.”
The focus on voting is visible in the conservative movement, even among groups with no clear interest in the voting debate. In a television town hall in February, leading Christian conservative Tony Perkins asked several questions about the vote before addressing topics on the social issues his Family Research Council usually focuses on.
Perkins answered the question by recalling how voting laws in his native Louisiana state became stricter after a close Senate 1996 race won by Democrats. He noted that the state is now voting Republican solidly.
“If you have free, fair elections, you will have positive outcomes,” Perkins said before urging viewers to urge state lawmakers to “restore electoral integrity.”
Stronger voting rights have long been a conservative goal, driven by the old days – and some say it’s outdated – conventional wisdom that Republicans thrive in elections with lower turnout, and Democrats in elections with more voters. This translated into the GOP’s efforts to tighten voter identification laws and require regular voter clearance. Both efforts tend to exclude black and Latino voters, groups that are democratic, out of proportion.
In a sign of increasing attention to the issue last year, Leonard Leo, a Trump adviser and one of the strategists behind the conservative focus on the federal judiciary, formed The Honest Elections Project to strive for voting restrictions and coordination of the IDP effort to vote for the 2020.
But the issue has expanded beyond what many conservatives expected. As Trump fraudulently pleaded not guilty to his loss, and he and his allies lost more than 50 court cases to stop the election, his conservative base became convinced of vague “irregularities” and holes in the voting system.
While Leo’s group, like other parts of the GOP foundation, kept a distance from such demands, state legislators quickly intervened with bills aimed at solving ghost problems and restoring confidence in the system.
“We are sure that our vote will count, we are sure that our vote is safe, we are sure that our system is fair and that there are no shameful activities,” said Iowa Representative Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican. the election bill that shortened the state’s early voting period.
Leo’s group has since released a list of its legislative amendments to be elected.
Similarly, other outside groups soon jumped into the debate waking up their activists who write the letters, make phone calls, and send the small donations that keep the groups relevant.
“It has crossed the priority chain,” said Noah Wall, executive vice president of FreedomWorks, who trained 60 top activists in Orlando over the past weekend on voting issues. “If you were to poll our activists now, electoral integrity would be at the top of the list. Twelve months ago this was not the case. ”