Congress is poised to pass changes to the Electoral Count Act, proposed in reaction to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
But the White House, which has routinely ripped Republicans as election deniers while remaining relatively quiet regarding the bill’s text, is unlikely to tinker with its message related to concerns about democracy.
BIDEN’S COUNTER-ANTISEMITISM CAMPAIGN SUBTLY TARGETS TRUMP
Days after the House Jan. 6 committee released its findings and voted unanimously to refer Trump and his closest allies to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, passing the Electoral Count Reform Act, “the most tangible response to Jan. 6,” would be “major,” according to Lawrence Jacobs, the University of Minnesota’s McKnight presidential chair.
“It is unlikely to dent the Democratic criticism of the Republican Party,” Jacobs told the Washington Examiner. “It should. ECA and the broad GOP support, in the face of Trump’s opposition, are important accomplishments.”
“Each party has now incorporated claims about democracy into their political DNA,” the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance director added. “After all, many GOP still treat election denial as a litmus test despite the evidence of political harm.”
Acknowledging the limitations of the Electoral Count Reform Act, included in the $1.7 trillion omnibus government funding deal struck to avoid a shutdown at the end of this week, University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden agreed it is an “important improvement.”
“It is unlikely that any change in law on its own will have much effect on misinformation about how elections are run in the U.S.,” the political science professor said. “However, the bipartisan initiative to put more guardrails on the electoral count process is a welcome reform that should control efforts to undermine future presidential elections.”
But Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who took part in drafting the measure amending the original 1887 framework that sets forth the Electoral College’s role in presidential elections, previewed potential Republican attacks by qualifying the significance of its likely passage as soon as Thursday.
“This bill makes it harder for a corrupt president or a corrupt governor to send the wrong set of electors to Washington for the electoral count, but it doesn’t completely rule out that possibility,” he told CNN on Tuesday. “I don’t want to overstate the importance of the Electoral Count Reform Act. It makes it harder for the wrong president to be chosen by the Electoral College, but it is still not impossible that Donald Trump, in league with some corrupt governor, could send the slate of electors for the losing candidate to the Electoral College.”
A day earlier, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre underscored Biden’s Electoral Count Reform Act endorsement. Jean-Pierre and her colleagues have previously downplayed the Electoral Count Reform Act in favor of broader election-centered legislation, such as the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Senate failed to pass the Freedom to Vote Act last fall and has so far declined to consider the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
“The president has been very clear: Our democracy continues and remains under threat, and we all have a part to protect it,” Jean-Pierre said this week. “We support [the Electoral Count Reform Act]. We continue to believe this [is] a priority, and [it] has seen bipartisan support, as you know, in both the House and the Senate. We hope Congress acts and sends this to the president’s desk.”
Biden continued to frame his campaign message as a “battle for the soul of the nation” before last month’s midterm cycle and again during a post-election fundraiser this month in Boston ahead of Georgia’s Dec. 6 Senate runoff. There, the president spoke of the “50-some people or 30-some people on the other team” who are election deniers.
“I got criticized very harshly for making a speech in the summer down at Independence Hall about [how] democracy was under siege,” he said of his September prime-time Philadelphia remarks. “This is not your father’s Republican Party. This is a different breed, a different breed of cat. For real. There’s still some really decent, honorable men and women in the United States Senate who are Republicans, but there’s also those who really think the institutions are not to be respected that much.”
The Democratic National Committee, the political arm of the party, has amplified Biden’s election denier complaints. For example, DNC spokesman Ammar Moussa has slammed the coming 2024 Republican presidential primary as “a race to the bottom to see who can out-MAGA each other.”
“Make no mistake — whether it’s Trump, or any other Republican, this party is united around an extreme MAGA agenda of banning abortion, boosting election deniers, and gutting Social Security and Medicare,” he wrote last month.
Although the Electoral Count Reform Act has attracted bipartisan support, several Republican endorsements are not about Trump, at least publicly. For instance, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says his backing is based on concerns not doing so would encourage calls to abolish the Electoral College amid GOP election integrity and security anxieties.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The Electoral Count Reform Act strives to strip ambiguities from the process of tallying and certifying Electoral College votes for the president and vice president, as stipulated by the Constitution. The omnibus, likely this Congress’s last action, also encompasses the Presidential Transition Improvement Act, which clarifies when the president- and vice president-elect can receive federal resources to ensure an orderly transfer of power.
