The Democratic-controlled House passed the For the People Act of 2021 on Wednesday, also known as H.R. 1. This is a major, sweeping election reform bill that will expand voting rights, limit gerrymandering, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of financial lobbying, create a public financing option for congressional campaigns and create new ethics rules for officeholders. Unfortunately, it faces an uphill battle in the Senate.
The fight over this major reform bill could not come at a more crucial time: the 2022 midterms are just over the horizon, political polarization is at its worst in pretty much all of American history, the decennial congressional redistricting is about to occur (which could determine control of Congress for at least six years), and after Republican-controlled legislatures are moving to pass laws to limit and suppress voting by eliminating mail-in voting and strict voter ID laws in response to President Biden and Democrats’ sweeping victories in the 2020 election.
Democrats describe the landmark legislation as anti-corruption legislation that would expand access to voting for all Americans and make Washington more accountable and transparent. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said, “Everything is at stake. We must win this race, this fight. At the same time as we are gathering here to honor our democracy, across the country over 200 bills are being put together, provisions are being put forward to suppress the vote,” pointing out Republicans’ relentless efforts to make voting more difficult.
The 791-page bill, billed as H.R. 1 to show Democratic priorities, passed the House 220 to 210 mostly along party lines (just one Democrat, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, bucked the party line and voted “no” on the bill; not a single House Republican supported the bill).
The bill, if it became law, would be the most significant enhancement of federal voting rights since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law. Among its provisions, it would require all states to offer same-day voter registration and allow voters to change their registration information at the polls directly. It would mandate at least 15 days of early voting, establish automatic voter registration, expand mail voting, make Election Day a federal holiday, require states to offer online voter registration (currently offered in 39 states and Washington, D.C.), would make it a criminal offense to stop someone from registering to vote, would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote ahead of reaching 18, the minimum voting age, restore voting rights to felons who finished their prison terms, and make it more difficult to remove voters from the rolls.
The bill would also mandate elections to use voter-verified paper ballots, would introduce voluntary public funding for congressional campaigns, would require all campaign finance, including those from super PACs and “dark money” groups, to disclose donors, restructure the Federal Election Commission to reduce partisan gridlock, affirm support for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. FEC, a Supreme Court case in which the court ruled that political donations from any organization cannot be limited (and which a post about is coming soon), would affirm support for admitting Washington, D.C., as a state, require presidents and vice presidents (and all candidates) to publicly disclose their previous 10 years of income tax returns, introduce other ethics rules, and require states to use independent redistricting commissions to stomp out partisan gerrymandering.
Many of these changes would make it easier for minority voters and young voters to vote.
This bill is highly supported by Americans. According to a Data for Progress poll taken back in January, 67 percent of Americans supported the bill, including 77 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Republicans, and 68 percent of independents (voters not affiliated with a political party).
The bill was previously passed by the House in the 116th Congress back in 2019, but the Republican-controlled Senate refused to take up the bill for a vote. It was drafted by the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who was a civil rights icon and died last year. Republicans have been strongly against this voting-rights bill, decrying it as federal overreach. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Trump called the legislation a “monster” that “must be stopped.” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called the bill a “power grab” by Democrats which is “exactly the wrong response to the distressing lack of faith in our elections.”
Although expanding access to the ballot was once a bipartisan issue, in recent years, the support for expanding voting access has now grown sharply partisan, as it has now been concluded that high turnout benefits Democrats. Republican states have succeeded after a 2013 conservative-majority Supreme Court ruling (a post about this is coming soon) struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it easier for many states, especially in the South, to enact voting restrictions. The Supreme Court is also expected to uphold two Arizona laws that will make it more difficult to vote, in a case that is yet to be decided.
The challenge now for Democrats is to somehow overcome the partisan filibuster in the Senate which practically means major legislation must have 60 votes in order to pass. Since the vote is unlikely to gain 10 Republican votes, they now face an uphill battle in passing this extremely important bill.
Progressives who have advocated removing the filibuster to allow legislation to pass with a simple majority are hoping that stalled voting bills could help persuade conservative and moderate Democrats, such as Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of West Virginia and Arizona, who have been reluctant to remove the filibuster so far, to support knocking it out. Newly-elected Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., said that “the issues are urgent enough to leave all options on the table.”
Besides scrapping the filibuster, Democrats could also come up with some creative ways to allow them to overcome the filibuster, such as not allowing the filibuster only on bills that expand voting access (which could be a long shot, but Republicans succeeded in modifying the filibuster such that judicial appointments could not be filibustered).
In any case, H.R. 1 is a major piece of legislation that needs to pass Congress as quickly as possible. No one should be denied access to vote simply because they vote one way or another, nor should voting be made difficult in order to benefit a single political party.
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