Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez told radio host Thom Hartmann on Thursday that "voter suppression" is a staple of the Republican playbook against minorities.
Perez wrote an op-ed in Time magazine on Wednesday saying that President Donald Trump's "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity" was nothing more than a "propaganda factory for justifying the Republican Party's broader voter suppression efforts" against Hispanics and African Americans.
He expanded upon his article by saying that the Republican leadership in Texas cannot win the "battle of ideas" because they are wrong for most Texans.
"What do they do? They pass the voter ID law. They engage in racial gerrymandering. Let's have a battle in the marketplace of ideas and then let's work together to make sure that every single eligible voter can vote," Perez said.
Perez continued by calling voter suppression a staple of the Republican party, citing his former job as assistant attorney general for the civil rights division at the Department of Justice.
"I know that because I had the privilege of heading up the civil rights division and we had to sue South Carolina. We had to sue Texas, North Carolina, [and] so many other states. This is a staple. We can't win on the ideas, so let's make it harder to vote," Perez said.
Perez concluded by saying that the integrity commission is the "most misnamed commission" he has seen.