Kam’s ‘Freederick Douglass’ Dems
Vice President Kamala Harris compared Texas Democratic legislators who fled the state on chartered planes to duck a vote on an election reform bill to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, suffragettes and civil-rights marchers Wednesday — as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott accused President Biden of spreading “misinformation” about the legislation.
During a meeting with advocates for the disabled, Harris said the lawmakers “took bold, courageous action in line with the legacy of everyone from Frederick Douglass . . . when he fought for the right of black men to vote in
America, to the legacy that includes all those women who marched down Pennsylvania Avenue for women’s right to vote to all of those folks who shed their
blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge [in Selma, Ala.] to make sure that we would in 1965 pass the Voting Rights Act. Now we have, in 2021, the Texas legislature, many of them, traveling to Washington, DC, at great sacrifice, both personally and political, to stand up for Americans’ right to vote unencumbered,” Harris added.
The Texas Senate passed the legislation along party lines Tuesday night, but the measure is in limbo due to the lack of a quorum in the House after 51 of its Democratic members took wing to Washington on two chartered jets Monday.
In a video posted on Twitter Tuesday evening, Abbott, who has threatened to arrest the legislators and lock them in the House chamber to reach a quorum upon their return to Texas, said the president is “chastising us for making it easy to vote but hard to cheat.”
“The fact is that Texas is passing a law that expands, not reduces, the hours of early voting,” the Republican governor added. “That’s more than many states, including President Biden’s home state of Delaware, which has zero hours of early voting.”
The bill prevents local officials from sending unsolicited absentee ballot applications and would require applicants to write their driver’s-license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on those applications. It would also put an end to 24-hour voting stations and would ban drive-through voting. It would also state that partisan poll watchers are allowed to stand near election workers at polls.