Coronavirus: Adam Schiff Defends Pelosi’s Changes to Voting Law in Emergency Relief Bill

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) defended the alternative bill proposed Monday by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), as Senate Democrats blocked an emergency relief bill to save the economy from the coronavirus.

The Senate had been working on bipartisan negotiations through Sunday evening, when Pelosi jetted in from San Francisco and insisted that Democrats walk away from the legislation in favor of her bill, which she released later.

As Breitbart News reported, the Pelosi bill includes pork for special interests on the left — and radical changes to voting across the country, including nationwide same-day registration, mail-in voting, and “ballot harvesting.”

Chris Hayes of MSNBC felt compelled to ask Schiff about it on his program Monday night:

I wanted to raise a critique that has been offered by a lot of folks in the Republican Party, and conservatives observing this today, which is that they say the Democrats are essentially trying to smuggle in a whole bunch of sort of preexisting ideological points — extension of the solar tax credit, changing to the funding mechanism of the post office, which is, the funding mechanism is messed up in lots of ways — but they say you guys sort of see this opportunity to get a bunch of stuff you wanted anyway, in under the cover of emergency legislation. What’s your response to that?

Schiff answered:

Well, look, I think what they’re really focused on is we want to make sure that we protect [not] only the health of the economy but the health of our democracy, and for that reason, we want to make sure that we provide that people can vote by mail, and have early voting. We saw the fiasco in Ohio, we don’t want that repeated. And I think hat Donald Trump would like, what [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch Mcconnell would like, is a situation where they can create a corporate slush fund that they can do with as they choose, and the voters won’t be able to hold him accountable, they won’t be able to get to the ballot places without risking their lives. And so, we view the economic health and the health of our democracy as very much interrelated. They view the health of their slush fund, and suppressing the vote, as interrelated, and I think that’s part of the conflict.

Schiff was one of only several Democrats attempting to defend Pelosi’s bill against nationwide criticism.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.