President Joe Biden slammed Georgia's restrictive new voting law in a statement, calling it "Jim Crow in the 21st Century," and urged Congress to take action to protect voting rights.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Republican-backed bill into law Thursday which includes new restrictions on voting by mail and greater legislative control over how elections are run. Democrats and voting rights groups say the law will disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.
"More Americans voted in the 2020 elections than any election in our nation’s history," Biden said in a statement, praising the successful presidential election and runoff Senate elections in the state: "Recount after recount and court case after court case upheld the integrity and outcome of a clearly free, fair, and secure democratic process."
"Yet instead of celebrating the rights of all Georgians to vote or winning campaigns on the merits of their ideas," Biden continued, "Republicans in the state instead rushed through an un-American law to deny people the right to vote."
The bill is part of a wave of GOP-backed election bills introduced in states around the country after former President Donald Trump stoked false claims that fraud led to his 2020 election defeat. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there are 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states as of Feb. 19, 2021.
The president called the bill "a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience" before going on to list some of its provisions.
"Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over," Biden noted. "It adds rigid restrictions on casting absentee ballots that will effectively deny the right to vote to countless voters. And it makes it a crime to provide water to voters while they wait in line – lines Republican officials themselves have created by reducing the number of polling sites across the state, disproportionately in Black neighborhoods."
Biden urged Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act "to make it easier for all eligible Americans access the ballot box and prevent attacks on the sacred right to vote," saying Congress has "a moral and Constitutional obligation to act."
Democrats and Republicans in the Senate clashed over the For the People Act in a hearing this week. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called GOP-backed election restrictions "shameful."
“Today, now, in the 21st century, there is a concerted, nationwide effort to limit the right of American citizens to vote and to truly have a voice in their own government,” Schumer said, before posing a question: “I would like to ask my Republican colleagues, Why are you so afraid of democracy?”
“Why, instead of trying to win voters over that you lost in the last election, are you trying to prevent them from voting?” Schumer asked, claiming that the restrictive laws being introduced by Republican-led statehouses “smack of Jim Crow.”
McConnell countered, saying that Democrats are the ones who should be “ashamed” for some of the provisions in the bill, including one that would tweak the Federal Election Commission to an odd number to break deadlocks, which the Kentucky Republican said would turn the body into a “partisan prosecutor.”
“This is an attempt by one party to write the rules of our political system,” McConnell said. “We can’t afford to go further down this road.”
"I will take my case to the American people – including Republicans who joined the broadest coalition of voters ever in this past election to put country before party," Biden concluded. "If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote."
Before leaving the White House for Delaware Friday, Biden said that the White House and the Justice Department are both looking into the matter.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.