With only weeks until Election Day, the Republican National Committee is escalating its war over Gmail’s spam filters in what critics deem a bad-faith effort to bully Google into letting them spam user inboxes.This partisan outrage resulted in top Republican lawmakers summoning Google executives for closed-door meetings over the summer to discuss the issue.In June, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) went as far as introducing a bill, backed by GOP heavyweights like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), essentially banning email providers from filtering out any spammy messages from verified political senders.“Eligible committees that will comply with strict security requirements and best practice standards can now register to participate in this pilot program approved by the Federal Election Commission,” said Google spokesperson José Castañeda in a statement on Thursday.“I view Google’s verified sender program as more of an exercise in PR than actually addressing the issues or concerns of political email senders,” Eric Wilson, a GOP strategist and former digital director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said in an interview last week."