In an invitation-only call last week, Sen. Ted Cruz met with Republican lawmakers to call them into battle over the issue of voting rights.
Democrats are trying to extend voting rights to “illegal aliens” and “child abusers,” he said, and Republicans must do everything they can to stop them. If they now push powerful election legislation before the Senate, the Republican Party will not win elections again for generations, he said.
Asked if there was room for compromise, Cruz was blunt: “No.”
“The sole goal of HR 1 is to ensure that Democrats can never lose more elections, that they win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and state legislatures for the next century,” Cruz told the group . organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group with business support that provides model legislation to state lawmakers.
Cruz’s statements, recorded by a person on the call and obtained by The Associated Press, capture the intensity of the building behind the Republicans’ national campaign to restrict access to the ballot. From state houses to Washington, the struggle to know who can vote and how, often cast as “vote integrity,” has galvanized a Republican party in search of a unifying mission in the post-Trump era. For a powerful Conservative network, voting restrictions are now considered a political debate over life or death, and the struggle has overshadowed traditional Republican issues such as abortion, gun rights and tax cuts such as to organization tool.
This power attracts influential figures and money from all over the right, ensuring that the clash over legislation in Washington will be partisan and costly.
“It feels like a hands-on moment for the Conservative movement, when the movement realizes that the sanctity of our election is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high,” said Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action , an influential Conservative advocacy group in Washington. “We’ve had a battle cry from the grassroots, which has urged us to choose this fight.”
Several prominent groups have recently entered the fight: the anti-abortion rights group, the Susan B. Anthony List, has partnered with another conservative Christian group to fund a new organization, the Electoral Transparency Initiative. FreedomWorks, a group formed to push for a smaller government, has initiated a $ 10 million appeal to call for tighter voting laws in states. It will be led by Cleta Mitchell, a prominent Republican lawyer who advised former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Heritage Action has announced a new effort also focused on changes in state voting laws. It included a $ 700,000 advertising campaign to support GOP-written bills in Georgia, the group’s first foray into state policy advocacy.
So far, states have been the focus of the debate. More than 250 bills have been introduced in 43 states that are changing the way Americans vote, according to a count by the Brennan Justice Center, which supports expanding access to voting. This includes measures that would limit postal voting, reduce polling station hours and impose restrictions according to Democrats who represent the biggest assault on voting rights since Jim Crow.
This push was triggered by the lies of Trump who lost the presidential election due to fraud (claims rejected by the courts and prominent Republicans) and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that provoked those claims. unfounded.
But the fight for voting laws now extends far beyond Trump and moves to Washington, where the Democratic-led Senate will soon consider a series of voting changes. The package, known as HR 1, would require states to automatically register eligible voters, in addition to offering same-day registration. It would limit the ability of states to purge registered voters from their lists and restore the voting rights of former offenders. Among dozens of other provisions, it would also require states to offer 15 days of early voting and allow absentee voting. Democrats, who are gathering their own resources behind the bill, argue that it is necessary to block what they describe as voter suppression efforts in states.
Republicans argue that it is a bag of long-standing Democratic goals that seeks to tip the election in their favor. Cruz claimed it would lead to the voting of millions of “criminals and illegal aliens.”
The bill “says the United States would be better off voting for more killers, the United States would be better off voting for more rapists and child abusers,” Cruz said.
He added that he had recently participated in an all-day strategy call with national conservative leaders to coordinate opposition. Leaders agreed that Republicans would try to change the brand of the Democratic-backed bill as the “Corrupt Politicians Act,” he said.
The focus on voting is visible throughout the Conservative movement, even among groups that have no clear interest in the voting debate. In a televised town hall in February, Christian Conservative leader Tony Perkins asked several questions about the vote before addressing issues on social issues on which his Family Research Council normally focuses.
Perkins answered the question by recalling how voting laws became stricter in his native Louisiana after a narrow 1996 Senate race won by Democrats. He noted that now the state votes firmly Republican.
“When you have free and fair elections, you will have positive results,” Perkins said before urging viewers to push state lawmakers to “restore electoral integrity”.
Stronger voting regulations have long been a conservative goal, driven by old – and some say obsolete – conventional wisdom that Republicans thrive in elections with less turnout and Democrats in those with more voters. This has translated into the Republican Party’s efforts to tighten voter identification laws and require more frequent purges of ballots. Both efforts tend to disproportionately exclude black and Latino voters, groups that rely on democracy.
As a sign of growing attention to the issue last year, Leonard Leo, Trump’s adviser and one of the strategists behind the conservative focus on the federal judiciary, formed The Honest Elections Project to push for voting restrictions and coordinate the Republican Party’s effort to control the 2020 Vote.
But the issue expanded beyond what many conservatives expected. While Trump blamed no fraud reasons for his loss, and he and his allies lost more than 50 lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the election, his conservative base became convinced of vague “irregularities” and holes in the system. of voting.
While Leo’s group, like other parts of the establishment’s GOP, kept its distance from such claims, state lawmakers quickly intervened with bills aimed at solving phantom problems and restoring confidence in the system.
“We are confident that our vote will count, we are confident that our vote is safe, we are confident that our system is fair and has no disastrous activity,” Iowa representative Bobby Kaufmann said. Republican who wrote —electoral bill that shortened the state’s early voting period.
Leo’s group has since published a list of favorite changes to the voting law.
Similarly, other outside groups soon jumped into the debate over who activated their activists who write the letters, make phone calls, and send small donations that keep the groups relevant.
“The chain of priorities has increased,” said Noah Wall, executive vice president of FreedomWorks, which trained 60 top activists in Orlando last weekend on voting issues. “If you poll our activists right now, electoral integrity will be close to the top of the list. Twelve months ago, that was not the case.”