Condemnation of “voter suppression” and chanting “shame” was met with accusations of a partisan election takeover during a high-emotion hearing that marked the Senate’s first serious consideration of Democrats’ election overhaul bill.
A version of the For the People Act, which has the symbolic highest-priority numerical bill number of H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate, passed the House during the last Congress, but it never came up in the then-Republican-controlled upper chamber. But with Democrats now holding a slim majority in an evenly divided Senate, the bill is facing its first substantial consideration in a Senate with a Rules Committee hearing on Wednesday following its passage in the House earlier this month.
Tensions leftover from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building by supporters of former President Donald Trump, and Democrats still seething at Trump’s largely inaccurate claims of mass voter fraud, leaked into the hearing.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at one point raised his voice and slammed his hand down on the desk while pointing to a proposed law in Arizona that would require every absentee ballot to be notarized.
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“How are poor people going to pay for a notary when there’s virtually no indication of fraud?” the New York Democrat asked. “It’s one of the most despicable things I have seen in all my years. Shame, shame, shame.”
“I would like to ask my Republican colleagues: Why are you so afraid of democracy?” Schumer said. “Voting rights are sacrosanct. They must be inviolable. And if Congress has to pass a law or amend the Constitution to protect the voting rights of our citizens, that’s what we should do.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed Schumer’s concerns about pending legislation across the country, saying that the measures are not about “voter suppression.”
“This is a solution in search of a problem,” the Kentucky Republican said of the Democrats’ bill, noting that turnout in the 2020 election was at a historic high. “This is clearly an effort by one party to rewrite the rules of the political system.”
McConnell also accused Democrats of hypocrisy, pointing to the challenge in the House to freshman Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. The Republican won her election by just six votes, but the Democratic candidate, Rita Hart, has challenged that victory under the Federal Contested Elections Act, potentially setting up a partisan decision from the House Administration Committee ousting the Republican from her seat.
Republicans argue that the bill goes way beyond encouraging voter access measures, such as early voting and absentee voting.
The bill would legalize “ballot harvesting,” the practice of allowing a person other than the voter, which could include political operatives, to return an absentee ballot, though H.R. 1 specifies that those returning ballots cannot be paid based on the number of ballots returned. One of the biggest changes in the bill is the creation of a publicly funded campaign finance system. And Republicans argue that the bill would turn the Federal Election Commission into a partisan body by reducing the number of members on the commission from six to five, setting the stage for partisan decisions on the enforcement of election laws.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz called the bill the “single most dangerous bill this committee has ever considered.”
“This bill is designed to corrupt the election process permanently, and it is a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats,” Cruz said, adding that it will “promote widespread fraud and illegal voting” and is “designed” to register illegal immigrants to vote.
“The bill explicitly says if an illegal alien is registered to vote under its provisions, even if it’s illegal for them to vote, that illegal alien will not be liable,” Cruz said.
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Democrats face a steep challenge in making the bill become law due to the Senate filibuster, which essentially requires support from 10 Republican senators in order to overcome a blockage of the bill. The majority party’s desire to send the bill to President Biden’s desk has contributed to calls to remove or reform the Senate filibuster.
But it is not clear that Senate Democrats will uniformly support H.R. 1, either. Centrist West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin told reporters on Wednesday that a voting rights bill should be “limited to voting rights” and not “in so many other areas.”
