" />

The Moderate Voice

An Internet hub with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, indies, centrists, moderates, and right


You are here: Home / Featured / Biden calls Draconian Georgia Law “Jim Crow in the 21st century”

Biden calls Draconian Georgia Law “Jim Crow in the 21st century”

by Leave a Comment

President Joe Biden has labeled an extremely restrictive Georgia law “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

In what Democrats and some Republicans say is a draconian law aimed at suppressing black voters who turned out in force against Donald Trump and the GOP Senate candidates, Georgia GOPers passed a law with a wide variety of voting restrictions. The one that has drawn the most fire is a law making it illegal to give food or drink to anyone waiting in long lines to vote. The ACLU and Georgia’s state NAACP are considering legal action and the Democrats’ top voter suppression attorney is challenging it in court.

Here’s Biden’s complete statement:

More Americans voted in the 2020 elections than any election in our nation’s history. In Georgia we saw this most historic demonstration of the power of the vote twice – in November and then again in the runoff election for the U.S. Senate seats in January. 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, Republicans in the state instead rushed through an un-American law to deny people the right to vote. This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country is a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience. 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. 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.

This is Jim Crow in the 21st Century. It must end. We have a moral and Constitutional obligation to act. I once again urge 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.

And 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.

If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote.

The law itself was bad enough but photos of it being signed were most notable because everyone it in — Gov Brian Kemp and legislators — were white.

Reuters:

Georgia on Thursday enacted broad voting restrictions championed by Republicans that activists said aimed to curtail the influence of Black voters who were instrumental in state elections that helped Democrats win the White House and narrow control of the U.S. Senate.

As soon as Republican Governor Brian Kemp signed the law, voting rights activists vowed to challenge it. The provisions add a new ID requirement for absentee ballots and limit ballot drop boxes.

Opponents of the measure decried it as among the country’s most damaging attempts to limit access to the ballot box, and said it was designed to reduce the influence of Black voters.

Kemp said he expected outrage from the political left and that he offered no apology for “taking another step to making our elections fair and secure.”

He alluded to the 2020 presidential race, which prompted widespread but unsubstantiated claims of election fraud from Republicans after former President Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

…The Georgia legislation is one of more than 250 bills Republicans have filed proposing new voting limits across the country since Trump’s loss in November. It passed both the state House of Representatives and Senate on Thursday afternoon; no Democratic lawmakers voted for the measure.

The Georgia law will make it a misdemeanor crime to give food or drinks to voters waiting in long lines. It also will set up a fraud hotline, forbid local county elections offices from taking breaks while counting ballots and shorten the runoff election cycle from nine weeks to four weeks. It will allow the state election board the power to replace local county election boards and permit challenges to voting eligibility.