WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) today joined Elizabeth MacDonald on The Evening Edit to discuss the U.S. Senate’s vote on S.1.
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Hagerty on fighting against S.1: “We’re in a 50-50 Senate. This is the most thinly divided, narrowly divided Senate that we’ve seen. They have the slightest margin. Yet, they behave asthough they have some mandate. Look, I fought against this bill in committee. In the Rules Committee, I fought against this hard. […]I’m going to fight against it and go vote after this hit tonight with you. I’ll be proud to vote against this. It’s the most brazen attempt at a power grab that we’ve seen. And it’s the number one legislative priority of the Democrats.”
Hagerty on how Democrats’ far-left agenda is out of step with the American public: “Their socialist agenda that they’re pushing from the far left of the Democrat party […] it’s becoming repugnant to the average American. This isn’t what America needs. It isn’t what America wants. And Republicans are standing firm against it.”
Hagerty on Democrats’ efforts to undermine election integrity: “Look at the content of this bill. I mean–what they do is essentially legislate some of the most vulnerable components of voter fraud. You know you think about the commission that was put together by our former President Jimmy Carter, former Secretary of State James Baker, they identified mail-in voting and ballot harvesting as two of the greatest vulnerabilities to voter fraud in America. That’s exactly what the Democrats are trying to legislate. They want to do away with voter ID. Americans are for voter identification. We want to know that the system has integrity, and this bill does everything to cut against it. By the way, it weaponizes the Federal Election Commission. You’re going to turn the judge now into the prosecutor, according to the way the Democrats want to run. This is not what America wants.”
Hagerty on Democrats using S.1 as a brazen power grab: “The Democrats here in Washington are just tone deaf, because again, America doesn’t want this. The components of this legislation, Liz, had been lying around Washington back rooms for years. They tried to pass something like this right after President Trump won back in 2017. They tried again a couple of years ago. Again, they put it through in 2020 using the guise of the pandemic that time. That was the crisis at the moment. Now they’re trying to pick on a few state election laws and say that’s the crisis of the moment. But what they’re really trying to do is forever shift the advantage to their court, and Americans aren’t going to stand for it.”
Hagerty on Georgia’s voting laws: “What we saw happen, Liz, was something during the pandemic where a lot of accommodations were made to try to help people get out and vote. In fact, in 2020, more people voted, and we set a record in terms of voter turnout. This isn’t a problem about voter turnout. This is about states then coming back, looking at the processes and procedures. In a number of cases, the [U.S.] Constitution was violated to make this happen. In fact, I put legislation forward that will actually deal with this, it’ll call for an audit of the 2020 election. And for those states that did violate the Constitution, they will receive no more federal funding for elections… until it’s fixed. But what I think we were seeing happen state-by-state is the states are coming back and saying, ‘what happened in 2020? What do we need to do to ensure election integrity?’ And they’re simply taking those steps. And in many cases there is more voter access today than there was in 2018.”