Democrats would like you to believe that H.R. 1, a sweeping elections bill passed by the House earlier this month, is the next great civil rights legislation. They don’t even believe it.
Some on the Left are beginning to admit the bill is a problem.
Back in 2019, when Democrats first introduced the legislation that is now H.R. 1, the American Civil Liberties Union, a notoriously left-leaning legal organization, said it opposed the bill because of campaign finance provisions that could limit free speech. Not much has changed. The ACLU has not come out against the 2021 version of the bill, but the group sent a letter to Democratic lawmakers this year warning them that the bill, as it stands, contains “significant constitutional concerns,” specifically in regards to campaign finance provisions, that will almost certainly be challenged in court.
Granted, the ACLU did not take issue with the bill’s most concerning provisions: its election rules that would essentially prevent states from passing any type of election reform and roll back a number of important voting requirements, such as voter ID laws. But the group could at least admit that certain sections are “onerous,” “dangerous,” and unable to pass constitutional muster.
Votebeat’s Jessica Huseman, who helps the nonprofit news group cover electoral issues, said much the same in a recent article for the Daily Beast. The bill seems to have been “written with apparently no consultation with election administrators, and it shows,” Huseman wrote. Even Democratic state lawmakers are concerned, because the bill would effectively nationalize elections and take away the states’ rights to govern their own elections.
“Listen, I’ll do this — if the law passes, I’ll follow it,” a state-level Democratic election director told Huseman. “But I can’t guarantee it’s not going to be a total clusterf–k the first election.”
“I don’t know what they were thinking, honestly,” the head of an elections nonprofit organization added. “It’s a bad bill. The goals might be admirable, but it’s a bad f—ing bill.”
H.R. 1 sets “impossible goals” for the states without providing any assistance, Huseman explains. There is no assured long-term funding for the states, but there is a long list of demands that most state officials believe to be completely unrealistic.
One such demand is that states must offer voter registration via “an automated telephone-based system,” which would raise serious concerns about voter privacy and election security. Another demand is that states must purchase paper-backed voting machines that comply with new standards passed by the Elections Assistance Commission earlier this year. The only problem is that the machines the bill requires don’t even exist yet, Huseman pointed out.
It’s obvious Democrats want to control the states’ elections. But that’s something they don’t get to do. The U.S. Constitution clearly gives state legislatures the right to dictate their own election policies. Congress does have the final say over the timing of federal elections, but nowhere in the Constitution does it say that Congress can mandate a federal elections code for the states, which is exactly what H.R. 1 tries to do.
The bill is bad legislation — plain and simple. Even the Left can admit that. But more importantly, it’s a partisan power grab, an attempt to take advantage of the shift toward mail-in voting, which statistically favors Democratic candidates, by loosening any and all restrictions on it. However, that is something leftists will never admit.
