Biden vows to stop 'sick' Republican voting rights restrictions

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WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden said on Thursday he is convinced he will be able to stop voting rights restrictions, which he called “sick” and “un-American,” as Republicans across the country seek to impose such limits following the 2020 election.

Biden said he would spend time advocating for legislation recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on voting rights and also educate the American public. Earlier this month, he signed an executive order making it easier for Americans to vote.

“What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It is sick,” Biden said of the push for voting restrictions. “The Republican voters I know find this despicable.”

“I’m convinced that we will be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing,” he said at his first formal news conference since taking office on Jan. 20. “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle … this is gigantic, what they are doing.”

Jim Crow is a reference to laws that were put in place in Southern states in the decades after the 1861-65 Civil War to legalize racial segregation and disenfranchise Black citizens.

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Biden was especially critical of Republican measures such as one in Georgia that makes it a misdemeanor to bring water to someone waiting in a voting line, and others that would end voting at 5 p.m., preventing many people from going to the polls after work.

House Democrats recently passed legislation to update voting procedures and require states to turn over the task of redrawing congressional districts to independent commissions. That bill faces a tough fight in the evenly divided Senate.

Biden urged the Senate to pass the bill.

Republican lawmakers in dozens of states have moved to restrict voting access after former President Donald Trump’s loss in the November election. They have seized on Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud to push for the restrictions, citing the need to bolster election security.

Georgia’s Republican-led House of Representatives passed a sweeping elections bill on Thursday that would impose new restrictions on voting in the state that helped Democrats win the White House and control of the U.S. Senate.

More than 250 bills with provisions that restrict voting access have been introduced in 43 states during the current legislative session, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice. “What they are trying to do, and it cannot be sustained,” Biden said. “I will do everything in my power along with the House and the Senate to keep that from becoming the law.”