Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock has used his first floor speech on Capitol Hill to blast a wave of Republican-backed measures that would make it harder to cast ballots in many states. Warnock is Georgia’s first Black senator, and his election helped secure Democrats’ Senate majority. In his speech Wednesday, he noted the country’s history of allowing voter suppression against minorities and the poor, and he warned that some Republican lawmakers are trying to reopen those chapters with “draconian” restrictions he cast as a reaction against Democratic victories like his. Warnock says, “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights and voter access unlike anything we have seen since the Jim Crow era.”
