Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Thursday called for President Trump to disband his shady “elections integrity” commission and said that Democrats would seek to do so in a government funding bill Congress needs to take up in September.
And if @POTUS won’t disband the Election Integrity Commission, @SenateDems will try to do it on a must-pass bill in September.
— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) August 24, 2017
Schumer’s request came with a Medium post he wrote on the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia where an attendee killed a counter-protester in a car attack earlier this month.
“The Ku Klux Klan and its sympathizers at all levels of government denied black Americans the right to vote for decades. Today, voting rights are once again under assault,” Schumer’s Medium post said.
He described the President’s commission, along with some of the of actions of the Justice Department since Attorney General Jeff Sessions took it over, as “wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are a ruse. Their only intention is to disenfranchise voters.”
“This is how the appalling failure to use the right words and stand up to hate in the aftermath of Charlottesville is made real in the form of policy; they are two edges of the same sword,” Schumer said.
In addition to calling for the dissolution of the elections commission, Schumer also called for public hearings on voting issues that would include the testimony of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who is the vice chair of Trump’s commission and is known for pushing restrictive voting laws.
“When the president began his ‘Election Integrity Commission,’ it raised a lot of eyebrows,” Schumer said. “But now, given what’s happened in the last several weeks, we’ve entered a new world and it’s even more important that the commission be disbanded.”
