Absent any agenda from Senate Republican leaders heading into midterm elections this fall, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee has released his own blueprint to “rescue America” with a mix of familiar GOP priorities and culture war politics-fuelled action items.
Republican Senator Rick Scott’s 31-page, 11-point agenda obtained by Politico calls for effectively erasing transgender people, eliminating questions about race on government forms, and completing Donald Trump’s border wall.
The campaign document also accuses Democrats of creating a “new religion of wokeness that is increasingly hostile toward people of faith, particularly Christians and Jews” and explicitly endorses the former president’s baseless narrative that the Democratic Party is “trying to rig elections” – as Republican state legislators file dozens of bills to change the rules of election administration and replace election officials with conspiracy theorists.
GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell did not put forth a legislative agenda ahead of 2022 midterm elections. Senator Scott told Politico that he believes it is “important to tell people what we’re gonna do.”
His outline for Republican plans to “stop left-wing efforts to rig elections” borrows similar language that his political opponents and voting rights advocates have used to describe an anti-democratic campaign to create more barriers to voting and hand oversight of elections to GOP legislators.
“They don’t believe they can win based on their ideas, so they want to game the system and legalize voter fraud to stay in power,” according to the senator’s document. “In true Orwellian fashion, Democrats refer to their election rigging plans as ‘voting rights’. We won’t allow the radical left to destroy our democracy by institutionalizing dishonesty and fraud.”
The senator, whose terms ends in 2024, was among Republican Senators who voted against Pennsylvania electors’ certification of presidential election votes on 6 January, 2021.
In 2021, Republican state legislators filed at least 262 bills in 41 states to change the rules of election administration and strip oversight from election officials. At least 32 became law in 17 states, according to States United Democracy Center.
At least 51 people who denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election are running for governor in 24 states, and at least 21 others are running for secretary of state in 18 states, according to a report from States United Action.
Eleven others are running for attorney general in 10 states, while GOP officials promote election-denying candidates for administrative positions at the state and local level, historically nonpartisan roles to keep the nation’s elections free, fair and running smoothly.
Senator Scott’s voting proposals would impose similar restrictions that made their way through state legislatures last year, when at least 19 states passed 24 laws restricting ballot access, including rolling back early and mail-in voting options, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
David Bergstein, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, called the plan “a blueprint for Republicans to lose Senate campaigns in 2022.”
“His proposals are a hodgepodge of unpopular and toxic ideas, guaranteed to turn off the voters that will decide the general election in Senate battlegrounds,” he said in a statement.
