The U.S. House Wednesday night passed H.R. 1, the “For the People Act,” an omnibus voting rights, ethics and campaign finance bill. The legislation would set national standards for federal elections, require nonpartisan redistricting, and put the brakes on hundreds of bills introduced by Republican legislatures across the country to limit ballot access in the wake of Democrats gaining control of Congress and the White House.
If signed into law by President Joe Biden, the “For the People Act” would require states to use independent redistricting commissions for drawing congressional districts, but not until after the 2030 census. Among other features it would, the New York Times reports, “impose new national requirements weakening restrictive state voter ID laws, mandate automatic voter registration, expand early and mail-in voting, make it harder to purge voter rolls and restore voting rights to former felons — changes that studies suggest would increase voter participation, especially by racial minorities.”
The bill passed 220-210, with two Republicans not voting. One Democrat, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, voted against the bill and expressed concern that independent redistricting might eliminate some majority-minority districts in red states.
Nicholas Fandos writes in the Times:
The prominence of the debate demonstrated the immense stakes of the fight over election laws, both for how Americans exercise their right to vote and how both parties aggregate political power. While Congress has worked for decades to expand access to the ballot, often with bipartisan support, the issue has become a sharply partisan one in recent years, as shifting demographics and political coalitions have led Republicans to conclude that they benefit from lower voter participation rates, particularly around cities.
“You can win on the basis of your ideas and the programs you put forward, which is what we choose to do,” said Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland and a leading author of the bill. “Or you can try to win by suppressing the vote, drawing unfair districts across the country and using big money to spread disinformation.”
Vote suppression is by now the Republican default position. The party’s radicalization ratchet operates in one direction only. Mask-wearing seen as apostacy among the party’s base, Republicans are dropping the masks that once concealed the party’s authoritarian core while publicly feigning commitment to republican government and democratic principles. Unwilling to adopt ideas with appeal to a majority of Americans, the party has gone over to the dark side. The only election reform Republicans will unanimously accept is one that declares its candidates the winners no matter the election results. The wolf has cast aside the sheep’s clothing.
All of which makes Democrats’ passage of H.R. 1 and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act pivotal to both party and national survival. As Ron Brownstein wrote Wednesday in The Atlantic:
If Democrats lose their slim majority in either congressional chamber next year, they will lose their ability to pass voting-rights reform. After that, the party could face a debilitating dynamic: Republicans could use their state-level power to continue limiting ballot access, which would make regaining control of the House or the Senate more difficult for Democrats—and thus prevent them from passing future national voting rules that override the exclusionary state laws.
But passage will require moderate Democrats in the Senate to accept the obsolescence of the Jim Crow-era filibuster and to vote to eliminate it. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) gave her most definitive statement to date on favoring its retirement in an interview with Ari Berman of Mother Jones:
“We have a raw exercise of political power going on where people are making it harder to vote and you just can’t let that happen in a democracy because of some old rules in the Senate,” she says.
Moderate Democrats Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) need to wake up and smell the antidemocratic bad faith perfusing the Republican party that once embraced Lincoln and Eisenhower. Those old rules no longer apply. The Republican Party is no longer republican. The Trump insurrection of Jan. 6 should have been enough to shatter any illusions, but some even higher up the ladder may be slow learners too, Brownstein found:
… several activists and scholars who support the election-reform bills told me they fear that neither the Biden administration nor Senate Democrats are sufficiently worried about the threat to small-d democracy coalescing in the red states. They are especially dumbfounded that Manchin and Sinema—and maybe others—would protect the filibuster on the grounds of encouraging bipartisan cooperation when Senate Republicans would be using it to shield red-state actions meant to entrench GOP control. “What’s the point of being a Democrat if you are just going to let Republicans systematically tilt the playing field so that Democrats can’t win?” Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the centrist think tank New America, told me. “At that point, you should just be a Republican.”
With over half a million Americans dead of COVID-19, a year of school irretrievably lost to the nation’s students, a year of isolation and economic loss for the rest of us, plus the near-catastrophic violent insurrection that began the year, Americans living through the 2020s were born under a bad sign. Democratic moderates must recognize what allegiance the Republican Party holds for our constitutional republic is near-vestigial. If it wasn’t for bad faith, they wouldn’t have no faith at all.
Act accordingly. Now.
Who was it who spent months giving speeches saying if this or that happened “you’re not going to have a country”? That guy?
Maybe Senate Democrats and the White House should pay attention to that warning. It was a declaration of purpose.