When a government makes a power grab, the grabbers typically claim to be acting “for the people.”
Thus, when Democrats took control of the House, Senate, and White House this year, the first bill in each chamber was titled the “For the People Act,” aiming to centralize election administration, strike down state election-integrity laws, politicize the Federal Election Commission, and restrict political speech.
The bill is not merely a power grab. It’s also a messaging bill. But on that front, it’s failing in a fitting way.
The “For the People Act” was supposed to signal the Democrats were the pro-democracy party while trying to brand Republicans as anti-majoritarian. More to the point, the bill was supposed to be the Democrats’ excuse to crush minority rights by abolishing the filibuster. Ironically, the bill lacks a majority in the Senate.
It shouldn’t be surprising the bill can’t pass the Senate. In the House, party loyalty is everything. In the Senate (in an inversion of the Founders’ vision), there’s more concern for public sentiment. And the public isn’t on board with some of the most important provisions of this law.
The Democrats’ bill would ban all states from checking the identification of voters. They have convinced themselves and many commentators that it is somehow racist voter suppression to ask for ID in this one setting. Most people believe it’s reasonable to ask for ID when someone shows up to vote.
Only 36% in one recent poll by Grinnell College said lawmakers should “eliminate laws that require voters to show a photo ID.” Another poll asked whether people support voter-ID requirements. The yeas won 53-28.
It’s hard to argue you’re on the side of “the people” when you’re trying to strike down laws that a clear majority supports as a way of protecting the integrity of their elections. Grabbing power from state governments isn’t terribly democratic either. In Georgia, for instance, 76% support voter-ID requirements, and its Legislature has accordingly implemented such a requirement.
The “For the People Act,” in effect, says, We know you want this law, and we know your elected representatives implemented this law, but you’re not allowed to have it.
Of course, Democrats pretend the state laws they are striking down are anti-democratic and racist. President Joe Biden said Georgia’s new election law “makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” which is a clunky way of saying that it is more racist than segregation. Biden falsely said the bill would “end voting at 5:00” and would limit voting opportunities when it actually expands early voting.
Biden, however, was simply parroting the standard Democratic and media attacks on the election laws Republican-run states passed in the wake of our unprecedented pandemic election. This pattern of deception tells you something about the push to strike down all these laws: If you need to misrepresent the issues in dispute completely, that might indicate you don’t think you have the people on your side.
It’s crucial to recall Kamala Harris’s failed campaign to be the Democratic nominee — the one in which she branded Joe Biden as a racist for opposing forced school busing. She openly ran as a prosecutor — that is, someone who would use the carceral power of the state to punish the bad guys. And the “bad guys” weren’t criminals. They were pro-lifers, gun owners, and other ideological transgressors.
For her presidential campaign motto, she even used the standard introduction she would give when she rose to present the state’s case against the accused: “Kamala Harris, For the People.”
Harris’s 2019 “For the People” act failed miserably. This “For the People Act” is on rocky ground. It may get further than her presidential run did because, unlike her bid for the presidency, the effort to make this bill into law doesn’t require popular support.
