The Patriot Post® · HR 1 Hits the Senate

We like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and we respect his keen eye for American Liberty and his dogged pursuit of its enemies. Yesterday, he went after perhaps the most lethal of those legislative enemies, Senate Resolution 1 (SR 1) – the Senate’s version of House Resolution 1 (HR 1). The Democrats’ power-grabbing bill, which is ridiculously dubbed the “For the People Act,” passed the House in early March without a single Republican vote and has now come before the 50-50 split Senate.

“This legislation is profoundly dangerous,” Cruz said yesterday before the Senate Rules Committee, “and the reason it suppresses millions of votes is by allowing millions of people to vote illegally. That is the intended effect and that would be the actual effect of this bill. It dilutes the legal votes of American citizens.”

Indeed, as our Mark Alexander noted in January, if the Senate passes SR 1, it will essentially institutionalize bulk-mail ballot voter fraud.

By now we’ve heard about the diabolical contents of HR 1: It takes over state elections and usurps state legislatures’ right to enact voting laws; it enables fraud by allowing door-to-door ballot harvesting and by eviscerating voter ID laws, both of which work to suppress the votes of legitimate voters; it funds career politicians and subsidizes their speech while suppressing the speech of private citizens; and it gives violent felons the vote, even for those who’ve yet to serve out their sentence.

In short, it’s a Democrat wish list, and a statist’s dream. Said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell yesterday, “The Democratic Party wants to rewrite the ground rules of American politics for partisan benefit. It’s hard to imagine anything that would erode public confidence in our democracy more drastically. This bill had purely partisan support in the House. It had bipartisan opposition.”

Not surprisingly, as The Hill’s Jordain Carney writes, “Democratic leadership views passing the For the People Act as their top legislative goal. To Republicans, their top priority is to sink the bill, pulling out all the stops to try to prevent what they view as an attempted ‘takeover’ of elections.”

Regarding those stops, Carney later noted that the bill still has an uphill battle. “Even as Democrats have seized on the bill,” he writes, “it faces a complicated path to making it to President Biden’s desk. With unified GOP opposition, it doesn’t have the support needed to defeat a 60-vote legislative filibuster. And it doesn’t unify Democrats, with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) suggesting his party should focus more narrowly on voting rights.”

The mercurial Manchin thus holds the keys to the Republic, and Patriots can do little more than light up his phone lines back home (Trump by 39%) to ensure that he knows, unequivocally, the will of his constituents.

Looking ahead, though, that uphill battle for passage makes HR 1 an even more destructive bill. Tuesday, November 8, 2022, is the date of the nation’s next midterm elections, and the status of HR 1 at that time may well gum up the electoral works. The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues it’s a midterm time bomb. “If Democrats pass H.R.1 this summer,” the editors write, “lawsuits would appear quickly. H.R.1 says legal challenges must be brought in the federal courts of the District of Columbia. Given the judicial makeup there, perhaps the law would be upheld at first. How long would it take to reach the Supreme Court? The midterms are 18 months out, and the first primaries are only 10 months away.”

The editors then suggest a scenario in which HR 1 goes to the Supreme Court just prior to the midterms, thereby casting a cloud of illegitimacy over an entire muddled election.

So HR 1 and it’s Senate counterpart aren’t just awful policy. It’s pure political poison.

(Edited.)