On Sunday’s edition of CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) sharply criticized what he called the “MAGA right,” accusing them of attempting to make it harder for poor Americans and people of color to vote, Breitbart reports.
Schumer argued that recent conservative-backed election proposals, including the SAVE Act, amount to voter suppression efforts reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. “They show no evidence of voter of voter fraud. They show there’s so little in the country,” Schumer said.
“And to have ICE agents, these thugs be by the polling places that just flies in the face of how democracy works, of how we’ve had elections for hundreds of years very successfully,” Schumer continued. “It makes no sense at all. And we will we will in our legislation, we say that ICE agents should not be anywhere near polling places.”
The New York senator said Democrats’ upcoming legislation would explicitly prohibit Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from being present near polling locations. “Most Americans agree,” Schumer added. “You talk to people at polling places who operate the polling places. They don’t want these ICE agents floating near them and intimidating them.”
Host Jake Tapper noted that public opinion surveys show about 83% of Americans, including a majority of Democrats, support voter ID laws.
Responding, Schumer said the issue lies in how those laws are structured. “We have the voter ID laws that, first, each state can have its own voter ID laws, and some do and some don’t,” he said. “But secondly, what they are proposing in this so-called SAVE Act is like Jim Crow 2.0. They make it so hard to get any kind of voter ID that more than 20 million legitimate people, mainly poor people and people of color, will not be able to vote under this law.”
Schumer pledged to block the legislation in the Senate, calling it “an outrageous proposal” driven by political bias. “They don’t want poor people to vote. They don’t want people of color to vote because they often don’t vote for them,” he added.