Senate Democrats, who oppose new Georgia voting laws and hope to pass their own sweeping federal election overhaul, are planning a hearing Tuesday calling the Peach State changes “Jim Crow 2021.”
The hearing title and witness list prompted quick criticism from Republicans and highlighted the high-stakes bid by Democrats to shape voting laws ahead of the next election.
Congressional Democrats hope to pass a broad federal election overhaul of election and voting laws that the GOP argues is highly partisan and would lock in Democratic victories for generations.
In response to Tuesday’s hearing announcement, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas published a nine-part tweet that flipped the Democratic narrative. Cruz cited historic examples of Democratic lawmakers who supported Jim Crow policies or belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.
The list included the late Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat and a former Senate majority leader. Byrd, long revered by the Democratic Party, once served as an “exalted cyclops” in the KKK, although he later renounced his participation in the group.
“Dems wrote Jim Crow,” Cruz tweeted. “Sadly, they’ve got a lot of expertise in bigotry & discrimination.”
Democrats are furious over new election laws in Georgia, which they claim would restrict the rights of voters and make it more difficult for them to cast ballots.
President Joe Biden called the Georgia law “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and said the Justice Department would determine if the executive branch can take any action to blunt it.
The changes, signed into law in March, bolster voter identification requirements, certify hours of operation for polling places, and set limits on the number of drop boxes voters can use to cast ballots. The law changes mail-in voting so that ballots can be obtained 11 weeks before an election instead of 26 weeks.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said the new Georgia law “goes all the way back to the 1890s when Reconstruction was followed by the Jim Crow era in the South.”
Durbin added, “Today’s voter restrictions might not involve poll taxes, literacy tests, or counting the number of beans in a jar, but, like the laws passed in the Jim Crow era, Georgia’s new voting law is a deliberate effort to suppress voters, particularly voters of color.”
Democrats plan to call as a witness Stacey Abrams, one of the most outspoken Democratic critics of the new Georgia election law. Abrams believes she lost Georgia’s 2018 race for governor to Republican Brian Kemp due to voter suppression, although there was no evidence of it.
Democrats will also call Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat who recently won a special election in Georgia, and Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
The Republican witness list is headed by Rep. Burgess Owens, a freshman GOP lawmaker who is black and supports the election law changes.
Owens denounced the Jim Crow comparisons and criticized Biden for comparing the Georgia law to the harsh and deadly discriminatory practices in the South from decades ago.
“I still remember seeing my father fighting violent white supremacists because my mother dared use a ‘whites only’ bathroom in the Jim Crow south,” tweeted Owens in his first term representing Utah. “We were on different sides of Jim Crow laws Mr. Biden or you’d understand how pathetic it is to compare showing I-D to them.”
The hearing will highlight the Georgia voting changes and, Democrats hope, bolster their effort to pass the federal election overhaul measure that so far has gone nowhere in the Senate thanks to the GOP filibuster.
Other witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing include Jan Jones, the speaker pro tempore of Georgia’s House of Representatives, as well as New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner.
Democrats say the measure would broaden voting access and make much-needed reforms to campaign finance laws.
Republicans say the bill would amount to a federal takeover of elections that would hobble election security and contribute to voter fraud. The measure is tailored to benefit Democratic candidates, GOP lawmakers said.
Democrats lack the vote to pass the bill in the Senate unless they eliminate the filibuster. The measure has twice passed the Democratic-led House along party lines.
