Senate minority Mitch McConnell on Thursday slammed a democratic effort to federalise the United States’ electoral system and released a dismissive statement that said there was “nothing necessary or bipartisan about the naked power grab.”

McConnell, a member of the Republican party and a Senator from Kentucky, claimed that Washington Democrats were creating “fake drama over a proposed election takeover that will go nowhere.”

Republican and Democratic lawmakers have shared disagreements about possible election reforms in the past month, with tensions flaring up recently on the “Freedom to Vote Act”, a legislation introduced in the United States Senate by majority leader Chuck Schumer.

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Hours before McConnell released the statement, Schumer tweeted, “Today, I’m announcing that the Senate will vote on moving forward on the Freedom To Vote Act on Wednesday. This is consequential voting rights legislation. It would establish commonsense standards for our democracy and help fight suppressive voting laws.”

McConnell wrote in the statement, “Senator Schumer wants to stage another political stunt around the umpteenth iteration of the same partisan power grab that Senate has already considered and rejected repeatedly.”

The Kentucky lawmaker added, “It is the same rotten core as Speaker Pelosi’s HR 1 with slightly amended window dressing. Democrats call this latest repackaging a ‘compromise’, but it is only a compromise among themselves. It is not a compromise for the left and the far left to discuss how much power they should grab.”

According to reports from NBC News, Schumer said in a letter that all Democratic lawmakers in the United States Senate respected party lines on the matter. 

He wrote, “We cannot allow conservative-controlled states to double down on their regressive and subversive voting bills. The Freedom to Vote Act is the legislation that will right the ship of our democracy and establishes common sense national standards to give fair access to our democracy to all Americans.”