then we speak to ari berman on the latest republican attack on voting rights. >> all across the country and a state like texas and florida, republicans are weaponizing and institutionalizing trump's big lie that the election was stolen in order to make it harder for democratic constituencies to be able to vote. amy: all that and more, coming up. welcome to democracy now!, democracynow.org, the quarantine report. i'm amy goodman. a warning to our audience, our top stories contain images of violence. israeli forces stormed the al-aqsa mosque in occupied east jerusalem this morning amid mounting violence in recent days. soldiers deployed rubber bullets, tear gas, and sound bombs at palestinians, injuring hundreds. over the weekend, israeli forces wounded hundreds more worshippers and protesters at al aqsa, including on one of the holiest nights of ramadan. protests have been growing against the expulsion of palestinian families from sheikh jarrah, a neighborhood in occupied east jerusalem. >> the plate is to occupy all of jerusalem and turn it into a jewish city that lacks an arab presence

. >>> i want to bring in ari berman, no relation, senior reporter for mother jones and author of "givee modern struggle for voting rights in america. ari, i think with every state there are two basic questions as they keep on looking at these laws. i'm going to ask the small question first and promise to ask the big question. in texas, the small, specific question is what specifically do these laws do and to whom? >> well, what these laws do is, first off, they criminalize making voting easier. it would actually be a state jail felony under one of the laws hb-6 for election officials to send out absentee ballot applications to voters. something that is standard in many other states. and then it also legalizes voter intimidation by making it very, very difficult to remove poll watchers that are being disruptive in the process. so this is the exact opposite of what a state should be doing if it wanted to make it easier to vote. >> so these are the very specific things that are being done by these laws or bills that may very well pass in texas soon. the big question, though, continues to

i'm joined by florida state senator chevron jones, and ari berman, senior reporter for "mother jones"n america." so ari, how restrictive is this bill on a scale of 1 to 10 in your view? >> well, it's pretty restrictive, zerlina. and considering that florida was cited as a model for election integrity by donald trump, by ron desantis, it's extremely restrictive, because this was the state they said was the model for the rest of the country in terms of how to run elections. and then when democrats and black voters started using vote by mail at a higher rate than republicans, that's when they decided to roll back mail voting, to ban drop boxes, to expand challenges to vote counting. so they wrote the rules, they won under the rules, but the minute that new demographic groups started using those rules, now they're rolling them back. >> the same question to you, senator. do you think this bill is as bad as ari lays that out? what's your rating on a scale of 1 to 10? >> absolutely. i think ari is spot on. and truth be told, there is no scale when it comes to our civil liberties. florida cre

ari berman broke the exclusive story today. context, what's the event, who is jessica anderson, and what is she describing in the video you obtained? >> thank you for having me back. so, yes caw anderson is executive director of heritage action for america, which is the sister organization of the heritage foundation. she is at an event on april 22nd in arizona for their top donors. and she is going through and talking about how they are writing what she called model legislation restricting voting rights all across the country. heritage is literally writing these bills for republican state legislators in texas, in arizona, in georgia, in florida, and that's why we have seen so many bills suppressing the right to vote in such a short period of time, that are all basically exactly the same. it's not a coincidence that's happening. heritage is literally coordinating this effort and bragging about it at this donor meeting. >> yeah, in fact, she talks about, the iowa thing is interesting. we did cover it on the show, by the way, and