Democracy: HR 1 and Done
“This is the worst bill I’ve observed in my time in the Senate.”
Mitch McConnell has served longer than any Senate Republican leader in history — so it’s safe to say he’s seen some bad bills. There’ve been doozies like Obamacare, the Green New Deal, the Equality Act — legislation to open the borders, ban homeschooling, and Medicaid for All. But nothing, McConnell insists, comes close to HR 1. In his opinion, the Democrats’ federal takeover of elections is the most dangerous proposal of all. In 36 years, Mitch declared, “This is the worst bill I’ve observed in my time in the Senate.”
If you think he’s exaggerating, let me assure you: he’s not. Mitch McConnell is a measured, thoughtful, and methodical man, and if believes that it’s “a blatant takeover of American politics by the Left,” then conservatives should listen. “They haven’t held back at all,” he warned. “This is a dramatic federalization of the way we do elections,” and that affects free speech, associations, and the constitutional authority of every state in the union. Organizations like FRC Action will be affected, political donors will be affected, the common-sense safeguards and processes that have protected our democracy will be affected. The goal, McConnell explained on “Washington Watch,” is to “construct a system nationwide that benefits the Left in every election.”
For example, it requires no-excuse absentee ballots, “something that some states did this year because of the pandemic, but was never thought of as a permanent solution,” McConnell explains. “A few states do it, but most don’t. It undermines photo ID at the polls and any effort to verify that the person voting is who they say they are. It requires what we call ballot harvesting. That’s the ability to go around and collect a whole bunch of ballots and turn them in for somebody else — fraught with the potential for fraud… It also mandates that anyone can register — just show up at the polls on Election Day and register. There’s not even a requirement that you prove who you are.”
The threat to our elections is so serious that 20 state attorneys general have written to House and Senate leadership, urging them to re-read the Constitution and drop this partisan heist. Indiana’s Todd Rokita (R) said it’s absolutely foundational, “in the sense that once [liberals] get a hold of the election process, the power of the people goes right out the window. And that’s what they want.” The Constitution is very clear, he insisted.
“The legislatures weren’t [changing the system],” Rokita pointed out, “liberal judges and unelected officials were. And what HR 1 does is [take] all of those terrible ideas, all of those bad practices, all those things that that caused millions of Americans to question the validity of the election result” — and make them permanent. One of the Left’s biggest targets is photo ID laws. They argue (nonsensically) that it “disenfranchises” voters to ask for identification — something everyone in America does if they board a plane, buy alcohol, open a bank account, apply for unemployment or welfare or Medicaid, drive a car, get married, adopt a pet, pick up a prescription, buy a cell phone, visit a casino, donate blood, or rent a hotel room. It’s absolutely ridiculous to suggest that exercising our rights as citizens is the one place where Americans shouldn’t have to prove who they are. Yet H.R. 1, in one fell swoop, would make that totally illegal.
Even in Mexico, Rokita points out, the government asks people to show a specific voting card that not only includes a picture — but fingerprints! “So this borderline third-world country is doing 100 percent more than we currently are in America.”
Remember, the founders didn’t randomly vest this authority in the states. They were painfully aware that the oppressive systems they’d seen in other countries were a threat to individual liberty. To protect that freedom, they wanted to decentralize as much of the power as possible. The people, they decided, should have the most control over government — and the state legislatures are the entity closest to them. “That’s an accountability measure,” Rokita explains. “It’s not left to unelected people or unelected judges. It’s not even left to certain elected officials.” He talks about how frustrating it was to be the secretary of state in Indiana and not be able to single-handedly strengthen the system. “If I wanted to change the [polling place rules], I had to get a state law passed.” He had good motivations — to make the process fairer and more transparent, but even then, there were systems in place to keep any one person from tipping the scales. “There was a reason I was not able to do it and only the legislature was. And we respected that.”
McConnell hopes his Senate’s moderates respect that too. Right now, H.R. 1 is in the Senate, where it would take 60 votes to pass. The bad news is, he explained, there are a lot of Democrats who want to change those rules so that this proposal — and other horrible ideas like the Equality Act — would only need a simple majority for approval. “Which brings me,” he explained, “to the importance of the legislative filibuster.” The founders created the filibuster to give the majority a voice. It’s the speed bump in the Senate that forces the majority to work with the minority to tone down far-reaching legislation like HR 1.
At times, both parties have debated the idea of eliminating the filibuster — and decided against it. Now, with the White House and Congress in Democratic hands, the pressure has never been stronger on moderate senators like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin (D) and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema (D) to abandon their positions and abolish it. “Put yourself in the shoes of Democrats,” McConnell said. “If you think this bill greatly enhances the chances of your success in every election into the distant future, you’re going to do everything you can to pull this off.” So his assumption — and everyone else’s — is that these two Democrats are going to be feeling the heat from the rest of their party. “So I would say to anybody… any reinforcement you can give to Manchin and Sinema would be extremely helpful.”
If you live in West Virginia or Arizona — and even if you don’t! — take the time to contact these two senators and thank them for holding the line. Encourage them to keep holding it, for the sake of the Senate and the sake of our democracy.
Originally published here.
A Dropbox That Isn’t Syncing with Law
No one will ever know how much fraud there was in the 2020 election, but in states like Georgia, where new information is still coming out, there are plenty of reasons to wonder. Four months after the mess of last November, experts are still investigating what might have happened to Donald Trump’s reelection bid. And what they’ve found is enough to get every American on the election reform bandwagon.
Twelve thousand votes may sound like a comfortable margin for Joe Biden’s Georgia win (it was certainly more than the six that sealed Iowa’s Mariannette Miller-Meeks’s seat), but a political landscape like ours, it’s not that much. Michael Patrick Leahy found that to be especially true when he dug deeper into the state’s absentee ballot controversy. It all started, he explained, where most states’ issues did: with rogue state officials. Using COVID as a cover (as so many Democrats did), Georgia’s election board took it upon themselves to pass a number of emergency rules. First of all, Michael points out, that wasn’t their job. It’s the state legislature’s. On that, the Constitution is clear.
But in Georgia, as in so many states, Democrats didn’t care about the Constitution — or the integrity of our elections. They swooped in and started making dramatic changes to the process, including adding ballot drop-boxes as a place to deposit your vote. Several conservative leaders — including the Trump team — were vehemently opposed to the idea, pointing to all the potential for fraud. For starters, they aren’t properly monitored. And obviously, the more there are, the more difficult they are to secure. One of Texas’s reforms heading into 2022, for example, is limiting the boxes to one per jurisdiction. In Wisconsin, leaders want them to be connected to an official government building.
Then, of course, there was the problem of people setting up fake drop-boxes. At the very least, Georgia decided, there should be some way to certify, through a transfer form, where a person dropped off their ballot, who picked those ballots up, and where and when they delivered them. They called it a “chain of custody control.” Based on the new system, there was supposed to be a two-person team that would pick up the ballots from the drop box, sign a form, date and time it, and then deliver it immediately to the county registrar.
Leahy, who is a majority owner of Star News Digital Media, decided to go to Raffensperger after the election and find out how many of those forms he actually got. His response? “Well, that’s not my job. You’ll have to talk directly to the counties.” Michael’s team did, and based on the information he had, 600,000 ballots were put in drop boxes. “So in theory, there should be a ballot transfer form for all 600,000.” He sent an open records request to all 159 of Georgia’s counties. Only 56 got back to them, but what they learned was shocking. Of those 600,000 votes, 404,000 had absolutely no chain of custody. No one knows where they came from, how they got to their final destination, and who was responsible. If 12,000 votes won the state for Biden, what would these 404,000 have done? Unfortunately, we’ll never know.
“Did somebody pick one up and not deliver it? Cobb County found that 80 percent of their ballots weren’t delivered immediately. What were they doing with those ballots? Where did they go?” No one knows, because the rules weren’t followed. As if that weren’t suspicious enough, Michael pointed out, a lot of these drop-boxes were funded under the radar by the Center for Technology and Civic Life — Mark Zuckerberg’s organization. They decided how many drop-boxes there were, where they went, how they were promoted. The Facebook mogul, an avowed leftist, was literally influencing how the entire election was conducted.
Over in Nevada, another key battleground state, the plot from 2020 is also thickening. J. Christian Adams’s Public Interest Legal Foundation stunned people this week with new research on Clark County. There, officials made the unusual (and unlawful) decision to mail ballots to all 1.3 million active voters in that Las Vegas area. Thanks to Adams’s investigation, we now know that more than 92,000 of them were returned “undeliverable” to wrong or outdated addresses. To put that in context, the Epoch Times reports, “the entire state of Nevada reported only 5,863 mail ballots returned undeliverable in the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 General Elections combined.” Not to mention, several people will point out, that this is a state where Joe Biden won by 33,596 votes.
And yet, all of these irregularities and mistakes would be commonplace under the Democrats’ HR 1. It’s not as if we need any more proof, but “Mass-mail balloting is a step backward for American elections,” Adams insisted. “There are millions of voter registration records with unreliable ‘active’ address information that will ultimately send ballots to the wrong place in a mail election. HR 1… will leave [Americans] at a constant disadvantage to correct election system errors which ultimately impact their abilities to vote in a timely manner.” As Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has said, “It basically codifies everything that was irregular or outright wrong or the opportunities for fraud during last year’s election and makes it the law of the land.”
Do your part to stop it! If you haven’t contacted your senators, email them and urge them to vote no on H.R. 1. For more resources on election integrity or to get involved in the reform efforts in your state, check out PrayVoteStand.org.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
