Martin Heinrich: “let's be clear. We are facing the most dangerous and overt threat to our democratic system in generations. Supreme Court…”

“let's be clear. We are facing the most dangerous and overt threat to our democratic system in generations. Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United and McCutcheon wrongly equated money with speech, and in the decades since, unaccountable dark money has flooded into our political system. This broken campaign finance system allows billionaires to drown out the voices of ordinary Americans with no accountability. This lack of transparency also opens the door for dangerous disinformation campaigns. After the Supreme Court gutted article V of the Voting Rights Act in another terrible decision, we have also seen State legislatures across the country take up and pass voting laws designed explicitly to prevent Black, Brown, and young voters from exercising their right to vote. These new laws in States like Georgia, Arizona, and Texas are right out of the pre-Voting Rights Act playbook of the Jim Crow South. Some have called them Jim Crow 2.0, and, frankly, it is hard to disagree. They make it harder to register to vote. They reduce early voting times in polling locations. They restrict access to vote by mail. In the Presiding Officer's State in Georgia, it is now illegal to hand out water to someone who has been standing in line for hours to vote, waiting to vote. Could anything be more wrongheaded? My home State of New Mexico is a good example of what it looks like to enhance rather than attack participation in our democracy.…”