Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., on Sunday asserted voting is “incredibly easy” and that Americans don’t want or need election reform.
In an interview with radio host John Catsimatidis on Cat's Roundtable on WABC 770 AM-N.Y., Johnson declared "There's nothing racist about voter ID.”
"Show me somebody in the recent past that has wanted to vote that couldn't," he said, according to remarks released ahead of the airing, The Hill reported.
"We've made voting incredibly easy. Nobody's suppressing the vote."
The remarks come in the wake of a defeat of House-passed voting rights legislation in the Senate, where a GOP filibuster stopped the effort in the evenly divided upper chamber.
Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona joined all 50 Republican senators in voting against a rules change that ultimately stymied the legislation.
"We have a 50-50 Senate. There was no mandate to fundamentally change this country," Johnson told Catsimatidis. "And yet Democrats, except for two, were willing to destroy the institution of the Senate to pass … this election bill."
"Americans are not looking for election reform," he contended, calling the Democrats’ effort to pass the legislation proved they want to "turn this into a one-party state."
"It's just something Democrats want to pass ... so they can literally turn America into a socialist paradise," he said.
Democrats' focus on voting rights took off as GOP-dominated state legislatures enacted restrictive election laws. According to the Brennan Center, 34 laws restricting access to voting were passed in at least 19 states between Jan. 1 and Dec. 7 last year,.
Fran Beyer ✉
Fran Beyer is a writer with Newsmax and covers national politics.
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