Roll Call reports, “With House Democrats poised to pass their 791-page campaign finance, elections and ethics overhaul as soon as next week, outside groups that support the measure are turning to the Senate.” House set to move on elections overhaul as outside advocates focus on Senate:
Left-leaning organizations such as Indivisible, Public Citizen, Democracy 21 and Common Cause, among others, have ramped up lobbying, grassroots and advertising campaigns aimed at the Senate, which poses a potentially fatal threat to the package.
Even though Democrats narrowly control both chambers, the bill would need at least 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. It’s a reality that has some advocates for the bill, which is dubbed HR 1 in the House and S 1 in the Senate, pushing to roll back the filibuster, at least in some fashion.
“We have a broken political system, a corrupting campaign finance system and a democracy that has been greatly damaged,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of the political money overhaul group Democracy 21. “This legislation makes historic democracy reforms, and the choice is going to come down to: Are we going to repair our democracy or are we going to let an antiquated filibuster rule stand in the way of fixing our political system and our democracy?”
Good question for these two. Do they really want to step into the shoes of Southern Dixiecrat segregationists who used the filibuster to kill civil rights and voting rights legislation? History will condemn them harshly.
On the other side, conservative organizations American Principles Project and the Susan B. Anthony List said Wednesday they were partnering in a new, at least $5 million Election Transparency Initiative led by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official, to defeat HR 1 and to mount what the groups called a vigorous defense of the filibuster.
The liberal group Indivisible says it’s budgeting upwards of $4 million on pressing for democracy overhaul measures, including support for HR 1 as well as statehood for the District of Columbia.
“We can’t fix our democracy until we get rid of the filibuster,” said the group’s Meagan Hatcher-Mays.
Democrats in the House passed a nearly identical overhaul package in the last Congress, but the measure died in the Senate, then under the control of GOP Leader Mitch McConnell.
McConnell is the minority leader now, and he has made opposition to the sweeping a package a priority yet again, saying Thursday that Democrats “want to use the temporary power the voters have granted them to try to ensure they’ll never have to relinquish it.”
.“They want to mandate no-excuse mail-in balloting as a permanent norm [Arizona has had this for years], post-pandemic,” McConnell said. “And — I promise I am not making this up — their bill proposes to directly fund political campaigns with federal tax dollars. They want to raise money through new financial penalties which the government would then use to fund campaigns and consultants.”
Mitch McConnell has for many years been the greatest obstacle to campaign finance reform, and the greatest supporter of unregulated anonymous campaign donations (“dark money”). McConnell is opposed to public financing of campaigns. He believes that elections should be bought by the wealthy plutocrats, not financed by the people. Arizona has had Clean Elections public financing of campaigns for many years, and moneyed interests and their lickspittle Republican lackeys have done everything in their power to destroy the Clean Elections system.
Vetting the bill
The House Administration Committee plans its first hearing on the bill for Thursday afternoon, and it will include former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who founded the voting rights organization Fair Fight Action.
Provisions in the House bill “would address the core assaults on voter access and create a uniform foundation for democracy in America that does not rely on geography,” Abrams said in written testimony to the panel.
The bill would create nationwide automatic voter registration and require paper ballots in all jurisdictions. It would set up a 6-to-1 optional public financing system to pay for congressional campaigns and tighten disclosure rules for political groups and super PACs that spend money to influence elections. It also would restructure the three-Democrat, three-Republican Federal Election Commission to a five-commissioner agency aimed at reducing party-line deadlocks.
It would also require early voting and expand voting by mail, two changes made hastily in some states to cope with the pandemic in 2020 that Trump and many of his GOP allies falsely charged led to fraud. Some House Republicans have responded with their own bill that would sharply curtail such practices in federal elections.
The Democrats’ bill would put new limitations on some behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts, require more disclosure of online political ads and create nonpartisan redistricting efforts, among numerous other provisions. It also would establish an ethical code of conduct for Supreme Court justices and require presidential and vice presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns.
Though Republicans support some pieces of the package, the GOP and conservative organizations are taking aim particularly at the optional taxpayer financing of congressional campaigns, efforts to expand mail voting and other political money and lobbying measures.
David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, which opposes political money regulations, said new requirements of disclosing donors to issue advocacy groups could have a chilling effect on their efforts.
“We have a right as citizens to join groups and not report who we are to the government,” he said, noting that early backers of the Civil Rights or LGBTQ movements often relied on their anonymity.“I think a number of liberal groups, when they sit down and look at this closely, they’re going to be really concerned about the scope of this legislation.”
This a reference to NAACP v. Alabama, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutional right to donate anonymously to non-profit groups. The decision was essential to efforts by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to end segregation in the South because it allowed their supporters to keep giving without having to fear violent retaliation.
Wealthy Plutocrats who contribute anonymously to these “dark money” groups do not face public lynchings, murder, and other horrific violence from white supremacists and the KKK that contributors to the NAACP did during the Civl Rights Movement era faced. This is the most specious “free speech” argument the right makes. They cynically use this case in support of their very efforts at voter suppression and disenfranchisement of black voters and other minorities.
‘If there’s a will, there’s a way’
Lisa Gilbert of Public Citizen said the effort also includes recent ads thanking members for signing on to the legislation, as well as public relations efforts, social media campaigns and op-eds in support. The attempted insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 has put renewed focus on the overhaul, she said.
Democratic Rep. John Sarbanes of Maryland, the lead sponsor of the bill, said he doesn’t expect much, if any, GOP support.
Even with the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, Sarbanes said Democratic control of the chamber means it’ll get a hearing and, likely, a vote — both of which could put pressure on Republicans to support the bill [not going to happen], or on Democrats to roll back the filibuster rules.
“The Senate’s rules are the Senate’s rules,” he said. “My view is, with reform that’s this important, this critical for so many Americans, that if there’s a will, there’s a way.” He said he hopes House passage will apply momentum to its Senate companion.
Voting for change?
Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel of public policy and government affairs for Common Cause, said that even as state and local jurisdictions run elections, Congress has the authority to set standards, such as requiring all states to provide early voting or no-excuse voting by mail. He noted that the bill would authorize $1 billion for states to update their voting systems. “We have really been ratcheting up our engagement with our members,” he said. The group has broken up its advocates into action teams that are driving calls and texts to senators, he said. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University who focuses on political money, said the overhaul could significantly reduce undisclosed funds in federal elections, while the public financing system could enable less wealthy candidates to run for Senate and House. “It could be a real game changer for who would have the ability to run for Congress,” she said.
“We are connecting the dots between the democracy disaster we saw last month and the real need for reform,” Gilbert said. The anti-filibuster effort Fix Our Senate launched a six-figure ad campaign in January and has another one in the works, said the group’s Eli Zupnick, a former Senate Democratic aide. The fight over HR 1, Zupnick said, is intimately connected to the filibuster fight: “The filibuster will be the brick wall that HR 1 slams into unless it’s broken down.”
Contact your senators and member of Congress and tell them the For The People Act is a litmus test for your vote in the future. If your senator puts preserving the archaic and undemocratic filibuster ahead of modernizing our election laws, they will not receive your vote. They are done.
This also goes for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, apparently not yet reintroduced in this Congress. Sonia Gill, the ACLU’s senior legislative counsel, writes at The Hill, Passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is the first step to heal our democracy (excerpt):
The language used by officials who deny the legitimacy of the election mirrors efforts from the earlier half of the 20th century. “Illegal voting” or “illegitimate voters” is the same propaganda used by the adopters of poll taxes and literacy tests to disenfranchise Black voters during the Jim Crow era up through the Civil Rights Movement. It’s the chorus of officials today who continue to shamelessly advance measures to restrict access to voting for minority, elderly, and disabled voters.
Next year will be the first national redistricting cycle since the Supreme Court gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Section 5 required state and local governments with records of voter discrimination to preclear voting changes with the Justice Department to ensure the changes were not racially discriminatory. For the first time since 1965, congressional, state, and local government legislative districts will be drawn without the key protections of the Voting Rights Act.
Our democracy is in dire need of stronger legal protections. Last year’s presidential election was the most litigated in our country’s history. At least 60 legal challenges were filed to invalidate lawfully cast ballots. These lawsuits had a single purpose: to disenfranchise qualified voters who voted against President Trump. Post-election lawsuits squarely targeted jurisdictions with the highest proportion of racial minority voters.
The courts — both federal and state, judges nominated by both Republicans and Democrats —unanimously rejected these challenges. … Despite this unanimous rejection by courts, states have already launched legislative reprisals against the historic turnout by voters of color. Georgia officials blatantly targeted minority voters this month with aggressive efforts to cut access to absentee voting, which has been available to all voters in the state since 2005 and which Black voters used in historic numbers in 2020 due to COVID-19. In Arizona, lawmakers introduced a spate of proposals to make it harder to vote.
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The ACLU’s litigation experience after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act’s protections reveals two things. Our record of success in blocking discriminatory voting changes shows that state and local officials continue to engage in a widespread and illegal pattern of racial discrimination. Second, the public lacks the tools to stop discriminatory voting law changes before they impact an election. Discriminatory laws that we ultimately succeeded in blocking remained in place for months or even years while our litigation proceeded — during which elections were held, and hundreds of government officials were elected.
The John Lewis Voting Advancement Rights Act will provide the public with the legal tools to block official acts of discrimination from infecting elections at the federal, state, and local levels. The bill does not seek to displace state or local voting procedures, so long as the procedures do not unconstitutionally infringe on the electorate’s right to vote free from discriminatory conditions.
Instead, it provides a framework of remedies and protection for voters who are at risk of racial discrimination by helping to root out unconstitutional voting procedures before they impede the voting process. It does this by restoring the preclearance regime that was gutted by the Supreme Court, ensuring public notice of voting changes, lowering the burden for obtaining a court order against problematic voting changes, and restoring the availability of neutral federal observers to ensure people can vote freely and fairly. The prophylactic approach adopted by this legislation is modeled after the original Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is broadly viewed as one of the most successful pieces of civil rights legislation precisely because it prevented unlawful voting procedures from going into effect in the first place.
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There can be no doubt that the need to safeguard minority voting rights is as dire today as it was in 2006. The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 showed the world that democracy is fragile, even in the United States, and we have to fight for it. All Americans have a shared interest in resuscitating the health of our democracy, and Congress has an opportunity to do just that by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.