Sen. Tim Scott’s rebuttal of Biden’s speech amplified the dark logic at the heart of the GOP’s war on voting rights
, one that’s been used by others to roll back progress on desegregation and voting rights in America.
Here, Scott plucks out the facts that bolster his case while ignoring the ones that don’t. It’s true that Georgia’s new law expands the number of early-voting days and doesn’t do away with no-excuse mail-in voting. But it also creates new time limits for when early voting can happen in Georgia and leaves it up to counties whether they want to allow more early voting on the weekends before an election.
Scott didn’t keep his remarks about voting rights and racial equality specific to Georgia and New York; he also spoke in the abstract about America’s “painful past,” and why that past shouldn’t be used to “dishonestly shut down debates in the present.” America was not a racist country, he said. And then he echoed an argument that has been used by conservatives from Congress to the Supreme Court and in the states to oppose voting-rights laws for decades.