National Review Online
Monday, March 08, 2021
Late Wednesday night, the House passed H.R. 1, the “For
the People Act.” It passed by ten votes, with every Republican voting against
it, as well as Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, who fears that the bill
will abolish majority-black districts like his in the Deep South. Thompson
deserves credit for reading past the title of the bill, which its cheerleaders
in the media seem not to have done.
As to that title, H.R. 1 says that it is “For the People,” but
tellingly, not by the people, or of the
people. Quite the contrary.
It would be an understatement to describe H.R. 1 as a radical assault on
American democracy, federalism, and free speech. It is actually several radical
left-wing wish lists stuffed into a single 791-page sausage casing. It would
override hundreds of state laws governing the orderly conduct of elections,
federalize control of voting and elections to a degree without precedent in
American history, end two centuries of state power to draw congressional
districts, turn the Federal Elections Commission into a partisan weapon, and
massively burden political speech against the government while offering
government handouts to congressional campaigns and campus activists. Merely to
describe the bill is to damn it, and describing it is a Herculean task in
itself.
States have long experience running elections, and different states have
taken different approaches suited to their own locales and populations. The
federal government traditionally intervened only to prevent serious abuses of
voting rights. H.R. 1 would upend that balance for no good reason, wrecking
carefully refined state regimes for securing the vote. It also throws out much
of the work of federal election laws passed with extensive bipartisan support
in 1993 and 2002.
The first target is to wipe out state laws that allow voters to be
checked against a preexisting list of registrations. H.R. 1 mandates that
states provide same-day registration and allow people to change
their name and address on the rolls at the polling place on Election Day, then
forbids states from treating their votes as provisional ballots that can be
checked later. It mandates online registration without adequate safeguards
against hackers. It mandates automated registration of people who apply for
unemployment, Medicaid, Obamacare, and college, or who are coming out of
prison. The bill’s authors expect this to register
noncitizens: They create a safe harbor against prosecution of noncitizens who report
that they have been erroneously registered.
H.R. 1 bars states from checking with other states for duplicate
registrations within six months of an election. It bars removing former voters
from the rolls for failure to vote or to respond to mailings. Outside election
observers are an important check on the system; H.R. 1 bars anyone but an
election official from challenging a voter’s eligibility to vote on Election
Day — thus insulating Democrat-run precincts from scrutiny.
State voter-ID laws are banned, replaced simply by a sworn voter
statement. The dramatic expansion of mail-in voting during the COVID pandemic
is enshrined permanently in federal law. States are banned from the most
elementary security methods for mail-in ballots: They must provide a ballot to
everyone without asking for identification and may not require notarization or
a witness to signatures. States are compelled to permit ballot harvesting so
long as the harvesters are not paid per ballot. Curbside voting, ballot drop
boxes, and 15 days of early voting are mandated nationwide, and the bill
micromanages the location and hours of polling stations, early voting
locations, and drop boxes.
States are compelled to accept voter registrations from 16-year-olds,
although they still cannot vote before turning 18 (an amendment to mandate
that, too, was defeated). Democrats and their political allies, who rely on the
youth vote, traditionally expend extensive resources registering young people.
The bill shifts the job of signing up young voters to the federal government,
which will pay to teach twelfth graders how to register, create a “Campus Vote
Coordinator” position on college campuses, and award grants to colleges for
“demonstrated excellence in registering students to vote.” This is measured in
part by whether campuses provide rides to get students to the polls and whether
they encourage both students and the communities around the campus to get
“mobilized to vote.”
Restrictions on felon voting in federal elections in many states are
overridden. This exceeds Congress’s constitutional authority over the conduct
of elections by directly regulating who may vote, rather than how. In fact, the
14th Amendment expressly permits felons to be disenfranchised — as the Supreme
Court held in 1974. State elections officials would be effectively banned from
running for federal office by recusal requirements.
Not content to remake the American voting system, H.R. 1 takes the
drawing of congressional districts out of the hands of elected state
legislatures — who have done the job since the Founding — and turns them over
to “independent” commissions, while banning mid-decade readjustments of
district lines. It also counts inmates as residents of their last address (even
if serving a life sentence), a provision aimed at reducing the representation
of rural areas where prisons are located.
These are just the warm-ups. H.R. 1’s crackdowns on political speech are
at least as extensive and biased as its changes to election law, and some of
the provisions on coordination and foreign-related activity are so complex that
even election-law experts warn that their impact is impossible to determine.
For example, one provision could be read to bar corporations from political
activity if they have even a single foreign shareholder. The new anti-speech
laws would generate years of litigation, and many of them would likely be
struck down by the Supreme Court.
New disclosure rules would treat huge amounts of speech and advertising
on matters of public concern as if they were campaign contributions, including
any advertisement urging viewers to contact elected officials to support or
oppose a program, policy, or law. This would require donors to, say, the AARP
to be identified as supporters of any candidate if the AARP demands that the
candidate keep a promise to protect Social Security. The cumulative effect is
to further burden citizen rights to petition and further insulate the
government from criticism.
501(c)(4) nonprofits would be required to disclose their donors, another
potentially unconstitutional burden on the freedom to speak and associate. New
limits on corporate political activity are extensive, and similar restrictions
are not placed on unions. Previous rules in place to enable free speech on the
Internet and prevent political bias in IRS audits are repealed.
What would an omnibus bill be without handouts to unworthy causes,
starting with the people who wrote the bill? H.R. 1 includes extensive
public-funding giveaways to candidates, including a six-to-one public match for
some donations to congressional and presidential campaigns. It also establishes
a pilot program that gives voters $25 apiece to make government-funded
donations to campaigns.
The labyrinth of new speech rules would be administered by the FEC, and
so H.R. 1 eliminates the commission’s longstanding bipartisan structure and
makes it more directly accountable to the president. We are sympathetic to
efforts to make executive agencies more politically accountable, but the newly
partisan structure of the FEC that would be created by H.R. 1 only illustrates
why it should not wield such vast powers over elections.
There are reasonable issues to be taken with the current system of
voting and elections, and constructive steps Congress could take. But not since
the Alien and Sedition Acts has one political party in Congress sought to bend
the power of the federal government, on partisan lines, toward crushing
political opposition to this extent. H.R. 1 is not merely a bad idea; it is a
scandal.
No comments:
Post a Comment