Sen. Sherrod Brown joined Rachel Maddow Thursday night, excoriating Republican efforts to make voting harder, and drawing a parallel with the conservative push to welcome floods of corporate money into politics.
"We're seeing, on the one hand, billionaires put huge amounts of money into political campaigns, overwhelmingly on the Republican side," said Brown, an Ohio Demcorat. "And on the other end they're tidying up voter rules to the point of keeping people away from the polls."
Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, John Husted, said Wednesday that in response to complaints that early voting hours in Republican-leaning counties would be run longer than those in Democratic-leaning ones, he'd decided to shorten early voting hours everywhere. The result, of course, will hurt Democrats disproportionately, since studies suggest they're more likely than Republicans vote early.
"This is just morally reprehensible, to allow more and more big money on one end and shut people down on the other end who'd like to vote early," Brown continued.
"On both ends of that, they've really betrayed the national interest and betrayed our values, what we stand for as a country," he added. "They should be ashamed of themselves for that."