Hillary Clinton did more than just call for
20 days of early voting Thursday in her address to Texas Southern University, a historically black college in Houston.
She threw down.
“Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting,” Clinton said during a speech at Texas Southern University. “What part of democracy are they afraid of?”
That was one of the best lines of
the speech, second only to this one:
"We need a Supreme Court that cares more about protecting the right to vote of a person than the right to buy an election of a corporation."
In short, Clinton called for a sweeping expansion of voting access for every citizen. Along with adding 20 days of early, in-person voting, she called on Congress to "restore the full protections" that the Supreme Court ripped from the Voting Rights Act. She called for "expanding early, absentee, and mail voting; providing online voter registration; establishing the principle that no one should ever have to wait more than 30 minutes to cast your vote."
And she called for universal, automatic voter registration.
Everyone, every young man or young woman, in every state in the union should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18—unless they actively choose to opt out. But I believe this would have a profound impact on our elections and our democracy. Between a quarter and a third of all eligible Americans remain unregistered and therefore unable to vote.
None of this made Republicans happy.
The Republican National Committee accused Clinton of being “misleading and divisive,” and noted that her home state of New York does not provide early voting. “Her exploitation of this issue only underscores why voters find her dishonest and untrustworthy,” RNC spokesman Orlando Watson said in a statement.
Testy, testy.
7:03 AM PT (Barbara Morrill): For more discussion on this story, see Denise Oliver Velez's diary here.
