This appeared in the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader

Legislation that would make it both easier to vote and harder for states to suppress the vote has thrown Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell into a tizzy.

Flushed out by Democrats who newly control the House, McConnell increasingly sounds like one of those segregationist lions of yore who roamed the Senate, cloaking their political self-interest in pious bluster about states’ rights and an oppressive federal government.

McConnell has the power to kill the Democrats’ bill by keeping it from coming to a vote in the Senate. Perhaps he thinks he also can transform the measure into a weapon to use against Democrats, which would explain why he’s been deriding it every day on the Senate floor and in a Washington Post op-ed.

McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, has all but declared that he’s against removing barriers to voting and making elections cleaner and more fair because he thinks it would help Democrats win.

The House bill is indeed a sweeping piece of legislation. The multiplying threats of voter suppression, a government closed to all but big-money donors and the corrupting effects on our democracy demand a sweeping response.

For almost every proposed reform, McConnell offers a cynical rejoinder:  Make it harder for billionaires to hide their political spending and their outsized influence over government? Gives “Washington a clearer view of whom to intimidate,” says McConnell.

Make Election Day a federal holiday and give federal employees time off to help ease the shortage of poll workers? Ew, federal employees hovering “around while you cast your ballot.”

Restore provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 that were overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013? McConnell spurns the role that Congress and the federal government always have had to play in protecting the rights of black Americans to vote without fear, something that’s true today for other minorities as well.

Most repugnant is McConnell’s opposition to restoring the voting rights of people who have been convicted of a felony and served their time. A poll conducted by the League of Women Voters found that 66 percent of Kentucky voters support automatic restoration of the right to vote once a felony sentence is served.

McConnell has added “transparency intimidates” and “states’ rights over citizens’ rights” to his “money is speech” gospel. No doubt, his sermons will be rewarded by those who think government should belong to those who have the most money.