Mitch McConnell wants nothing to do with Joe Manchin’s compromises on voting rights

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) continued his opposition to anything in President Joe Biden's agenda, including the compromise proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) on the voting rights legislation, Axios reported Thursday.

McConnell infamously announced, "One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration. What we have in the United States Senate is total unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition to what the new Biden administration is trying to do to this country."

Manchin said that he refused to support any legislation that isn't bipartisan, but even he doesn't seem to be able to achieve bipartisan legislation with what has become known as "the party of no."

"Senate Democrats seem to have reached a so-called 'compromise' election takeover among themselves. In reality, the plan endorsed by Stacey Abrams is no compromise," McConnell said.

Abrams told NPR's Morning Edition Thursday that she supports literally any legislation that supports making voting easier for all Americans.

"It still subverts the First Amendment to supercharge cancel culture and the left's name-and-shame campaign model," McConnell said with no real explanation of what he was talking about. "It takes redistricting away from state legislatures and hands it over to computers."

The Democratic bill, which enjoys support from voters on the left and right, would require dark money groups to disclose their donors and would remove partisan lawmakers on the left and the right from gerrymandering congressional districts. McConnell feels both would mean Republicans would lose power because so many districts have been drawn by the GOP to ensure they stay in power. The partisan gerrymandering has been struck down by the Supreme Court.

A leaked conference call with right-wing groups and a McConnell policy adviser revealed that the GOP is losing the war against voting rights.

"In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections," said The New Yorker in a May report.

"When presented with a very neutral description" of the bill, "people were generally supportive," McKenzie said, adding that "the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description," said Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch Brothers-funded group Stand Together.

Read the full report at Axios.