Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy spoke out against University of Alabama football head coach Nick Saban and NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West over a letter they co-signed pushing the Democrats’ voter reform bill.
Earlier this week, “Saban, West, and three other sports leaders earlier this week wrote a letter to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) pressuring him to support the Democrats’ Freedom to Vote Act that would seek to get rid of voter identification, allow ballot harvesting, and get rid of other measures aimed to ensure election integrity,” Breitbart News reported.
Roy, during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing, cited the letter and pushed back on its claims that Republicans in dozens of states have passed or are in the process of passing measures that actually bar certain people — minorities, mostly — from voting.
“No doubt these famed election law experts spent the weekend reading the federal legislation, which they were lobbying,” the congressman noted sarcastically.
“Cause I mean, I got the 700-page bill at 11:30 last Thursday night before voting on it on Friday…I assume they read it thoroughly over the weekend, as my staff stayed up in the middle of the night doing, to actually see what was in the bill,” he continued.
He added:
I assume, too, that they know for example, that the bill would lead to completely outlawing or eliminating voter identification. Do they know that four in five Americans — 80% — support requiring voters to show photo identification, in order to cast a ballot?
Do they know that Delaware and Connecticut require [ID] and more. I’m certain that they have studied intricacies of Texas law before disparaging it. I’m sure they spent time looking at that, or say studied the Georgia election law, at least a little better than studying the University of Georgia’s, say, defense.
Do they know that Georgia has 17 days of early voting and that President Biden’s home state of Delaware only has 10 days? Are we looking at Delaware?
This puts Delaware on par with Texas, which notably still has more than Maryland eight days, Jersey nine days, New York nine days, and Connecticut zero days. Zero days.
And that bastion of, of [right] wing nuttery Connecticut. Georgia has no excuse for absentee voting. Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware requires an excuse for absentee voting. Now look, I’m fine with Delaware having that option. It’s actually a reasonable debate, but does that make Delaware the target of this committee’s wrath?
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He then lashed out at Democrats for only focusing their ballot ire on red states like Texas.
“You don’t hear them complaining about Delaware. You don’t see the Biden administration bringing Delaware to court. You don’t see the Biden/Garland Department of Justice suing Maryland,” he said.
“Why are they doing this? Because they have to claim voting rights were being violated to try to save themselves politically.”
“The purpose is to delegitimize elections ahead of the game and to unintentionally divide the country. It’s spent four years of Russian collusion. Now they’re setting up the narrative for 2022, to use race-baiting to create a toxic environment of distrust to delegitimize a possible GOP majority,” he concluded.