By: Teddy Grant

Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock blasted Republicans Wednesday in his first-floor speech on Capitol on their efforts to make it harder for people to vote.

“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,” Warnock said. “One person, one vote is being threatened right now. Politicians in my home state and all across America, in their craven lust for power, have launched a full-fledged assault on voting rights” and on “democracy itself.”

Warnock also called Republican proposed restrictions “draconian” and said it’s a reaction to critical Democratic victories in November and January, which saw political power shift in Washington.

In January, the first-term senator’s senate victory alongside Senator Jon Ossoff helped turn Georgia blue for the first time since 1992. The win made Warnock the first Black senator of Georgia.

Republican-controlled legislatures are pushing multiple state-level restrictive measures that would make it harder for people to cast their ballots, such as more limits on absentee voting, shortening early voting, tougher voter ID laws, and eliminating same-day voting registrations.

The moves are largely seen as a response to former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was riddled with voter fraud.

Those fraudulent claims that the election was rigged led to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol during the process to certify Biden’s victory over Trump.

The one-term president was impeached for his role in the Capitol attack, becoming the first president in history to be impeached twice. The Senate acquitted him.

Senate Democrats are trying to pass the “For the People Act,” a sweeping election bill that would override many of the GOP’s restrictive voting measures, according to the Associated Press.