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Biden Slams Georgia's New GOP-Backed Voting Restrictions as an 'Atrocity'
Posted
March 26, 2021
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1:03Now PlayingThe arrest of a Black Georgia state lawmaker who was seeking entry to Governor Brian Kemp’s closed-door signing of a sweeping election law is placing sharper scrutiny on Republican-led statehouses’ pursuit of voting restrictions.
State Representative Park Cannon, a Democrat, was released from jail early Friday after she was handcuffed and arrested by two White Georgia State Patrol officers as supporters demanded to know what law she violated.
She had knocked on Kemp’s office door in the statehouse where he was signing a law that changes voting access rules in Georgia. Often a public ceremony for popular bills, the bill-signing took place behind closed doors with no media presence.
The incident prompted a range of angry protests, including from President Joe Biden and Georgia’s newly elected Democratic senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
“This law, like so many others being pursued by Republicans in statehouses across the country is a blatant attack on the Constitution and good conscience,” Biden said in a statement on Friday. “This is Jim Crow in the 21st century. It must end.
He urged Congress to pass two Democratic-led voting rights laws, and later said the Justice Department is considering what it may be able to do about the law.
“We’re working on that right now,” he said as he arrived in Wilmington, Delaware for the weekend. “We don’t know.”
After Cannon was released from jail, she tweeted, “I am not the first Georgian to be arrested for fighting voter suppression. I’d love to say I’m the last, but we know that isn’t true.”
She blasted the bill signed by Kemp as a hateful measure containing restrictions to “many methods of voting” that “serve no purpose other than to keep voters from exercising their constitutional right to vote.”
Democrats and voting rights groups have criticized what they call a voter-suppression bill. Republicans argue its aim is to improve election integrity in the wake of what they say was voter fraud during the 2020 election -- a baseless claim advanced by President Donald Trump after his re-election defeat.
He has particularly targeted Georgia, which Biden won in November.
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