Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota is continuing to travel around the U.S. to push for federal legislation that protects “voting rights,” which she and many other Democrats believe to be in grave danger.
On Wednesday Klobuchar participated in a roundtable discussion at the Urban League of Greater Madison with Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. Klobuchar called Republican efforts to modify state laws to protect election integrity “evil.”
“That’s what you saw with civil rights in the ’60s, when bad things were happening in states,” she said. “They came to Washington expecting that is the place where they could find salvation.”
One federal bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, passed the House of Representatives earlier this week, though due to the filibuster it faces almost certain death in the Senate. Another bill, the For the People Act, was reintroduced this March after dying in the Senate in 2019, but a final vote has been blocked by filibustering Senate Republicans.
In a press release following the event, Klobuchar claimed there is a “coordinated effort to limit the freedom to vote,” standing by her commitment to “build consensus on a voting rights bill that will be at the top of our agenda in September.”
In July Alpha News reported on Klobuchar’s participation in a Senate Rules Committee hearing in Atlanta, Georgia, ostensibly the first such hearing outside of Washington in 20 years. The committee symbolically chose to meet in Atlanta after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp altered his state’s mail-in, absentee, and early voting laws.
Klobuchar grossly mischaracterized Georgia’s new laws as “discrimination with surgical precision [that] sow chaos and confusion and make it harder to vote.” Contrary to some of her wary Democratic colleagues, as well as President Joe Biden, the senator openly supports the abolishment of the filibuster to ram her “voting rights” agenda through.
Evan Stambaugh
Evan Stambaugh is a freelance writer who had previously been a sports blogger. He has a BA in theology and an MA in philosophy.
