Julie Johnson Shreds Governor Greg Abbott For Trying 'To Kick 95,000 People Off' Of The Voter Rolls

6 months ago

During a House Administration Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX) spoke about voter integrity laws in Texas and Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX)

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00:00I now recognize the representative from Texas, Ms. Johnson, for five minutes.

00:07Thank you, Madam Chair.

00:11I'm going to respond to Dr. Murphy.

00:15You know, the thing is, is that election integrity is critically important.

00:23Democrats don't want people who are not eligible to vote to be able to vote.

00:27Period. Full stop.

00:29But what we do want is that every eligible voter gets the chance to vote

00:34and that their constitutional rights are not infringed upon.

00:39And that seems to be a huge distinction.

00:43Dr. Murphy just said he was okay with a citizen not being eligible, not being allowed to vote

00:50if it prevented somebody who wasn't eligible to vote from voting.

00:54The reality of it is, the Constitution of the United States is pretty clear on the matter.

00:59I have my little pocket, handy-dandy Constitution.

01:03The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States

01:10or by any state.

01:13Period.

01:13And Ms. Helling, your constitutional rights to vote were abridged by the state of North Carolina, weren't they?

01:19They were.

01:20And that is unacceptable in this country.

01:23I don't want dead people voting.

01:25I don't want people who are non-citizens or not eligible to vote to be able to vote any more than anybody else does.

01:31But I damn sure want eligible citizens to be able to cast their ballot.

01:36And so the problem is, Madam Chair, and in this hearing, we're not talking about the ways to improve the system

01:43to make sure that we have inviolate guardrails in place to keep citizens from being prevented to vote.

01:50And in Texas, you know, Republicans have controlled Texas now for almost 30 years.

01:56And, you know, Greg Abbott, our governor, tried to kick 95,000 people off the rolls in 2019,

02:04saying they were non-citizens.

02:06And it turned out, you know what?

02:07They were actually citizens.

02:09They were people who had been naturalized, who had gotten permission to swear their oath to the Constitution,

02:16pay their taxes, were United States citizens, and they tried to deny them the right to vote.

02:19But it took a lawsuit to reinstate them.

02:21That's not acceptable in this country.

02:23That's not preserving election integrity.

02:27Greg Abbott also tried to kick 1.1 million of voters off the voter rolls in Texas,

02:33saying there was all kinds of fraud.

02:36Now, granted, he administers the Secretary of State's office to allow these unauthorized people to vote,

02:43that he supposedly now is saying, oh, we shouldn't have voting.

02:46And, again, that was proven that it was full of legal U.S. citizens to cast their right to vote.

02:55You know, there's all sorts of things we could talk about.

02:58Online registration.

03:00If every state had online registration, you could go in, update your registration, and it wouldn't update it.

03:05You wouldn't have all these duplicate entries.

03:06But you know what?

03:07Texas doesn't let online voter registration.

03:09To your point, Mr. Adams, human error, they don't allow the computer to work for you.

03:16Everything has to be done manually in our state because they make it hard to vote.

03:21Texas is the hardest state to vote in.

03:24I believe somebody said that, I think one of you said, this is the United States is the easiest country to vote.

03:29I beg to differ.

03:30At least in my state, you can't register online.

03:33You can't register the same day.

03:35You have to print a ballot.

03:37You know how many young people don't even have access to a printer?

03:40And then you have to mail it and stamp it.

03:42They can't even figure out their way to get to a post office.

03:45It's no wonder why young people aren't voting.

03:48We make it hard for people to register to vote.

03:51If we wanted it to be easy, everything would be able to be done online.

03:54We pay our taxes online.

03:56We do everything else online.

03:57If we had a national voter registration system, then maybe all this interstate moving could be addressed.

04:02There's things that we should be debating to improve the system, and I'm here for that all day long.

04:09But what I am not going to tolerate is this notion that we should deny citizens the right to vote like you had,

04:18like what we're seeing in Texas, like what we saw in Georgia,

04:21like what we're seeing in states throughout this country, under the name of cleaning a list.

04:28Because we're not ensuring the inviolate protection of citizens to cast their right to vote,

04:34as the Constitution requires.

04:40I wish, you know, the frustration, I am sick and tired of this insinuation that Democrats don't care about election integrity.

04:50That is false.

04:52But what we do care about is making sure that people aren't disproportionately targeted

04:56because of their color of their skin, their naturalized citizenship status, or anything of the matter.

05:01Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record an article from the Brennan Center for Justice

05:07titled Homeland Security Save Program Exacerbrates Risk to Voters.

05:11Without objection, the gentleman's time is expired.

Julie Johnson Shreds Governor Greg Abbott For Trying 'To Kick 95,000 People Off' Of The Voter Rolls

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