Rep. Jim Clyburn agreed with fellow South Carolina lawmaker Sen. Tim Scott’s assessment that America “is not a racist country.”
Clyburn, despite agreeing with his Republican counterpart in terms of whether the United States is racist, rebuked the GOP’s efforts to change the way elections are conducted. Scott gave the GOP rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s address Wednesday to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
JOE MANCHIN WON’T SUPPORT HR1 IN ITS CURRENT FORM
“I would remind all those who seem to feel that there is something different about having a country being declared a racist country and having entities within the country doing racist things. I think that that’s the problem here,” Clyburn said on CNN. “A racist country would never elect Barack Obama president or Kamala Harris vice president, but will we tolerate these kind of racially tinged things that are taking place in Georgia, in Florida, and many other states?”
He noted the partisan divide on the issue of election reform, which is occurring at the state and federal levels in response to the 2020 elections. Clyburn mentioned the law that the Florida Senate passed Thursday limiting mail-in voting.
Following an election that relied more heavily on mail-in voting than ever before, and the subsequent promotion of unsubstantiated theories of fraud by Republicans, voter confidence dropped.
Seventy percent of Republicans and 27% of independents do not believe Biden won the presidential election legitimately, a CNN poll released Friday showed.
Republicans argue that strengthening election laws, such as mandatory voter identification laws and limiting mail-in voting, are ways to restore the public’s trust, while Democrats argue that the Republicans’ spread of what they call misinformation is behind the dip in voter confidence and that they’re trying to address a problem of fraud that, for the most part, doesn’t exist.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“No, it’s not accurate at all,” Clyburn said, regarding the Republican talking point that their proposals would make it “easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
“There’s been no cheating taking place,” he added. “This is nothing about — I would like to know how is it making it easier to vote when you take away voting places, create long lines, then pass a law to make it a criminal act to give people water to drink if they get to be thirsty. … I would hope that Tim and everybody else would just stop perpetuating this foolishness.”
