The House Democrats made clean government their top legislative priority for this session with H.R. 1, the "For the People Act of 2019," a sweeping package of election, campaign finance, voting, and government ethics reform. They are taking the bill up Wednesday and Thursday.
The reforms would make it easier for people to vote, make it harder for state governments to suppress the vote and impose a swath of ethics laws for federal government officials. Chairman Rep. Jim McGovern opened the Rules committee meeting Tuesday evening to set the ground rules for debate on the bill, saying "This Democratic majority was elected to clean up this place and clean up our politics." The Rule allows 72 amendments to the 600-plus page bill to be debated over the remainder of the week.
In broad strokes, the bill tries to end dark money by requiring Super PACs to make their donors public, and impose lobbying registration requirements and provide more oversight of foreign agents. It also would set up nonpartisan redistricting commissions to end partisan gerrymandering and create national automatic voter registration. Some of those dark money restrictions have caused the ACLU to oppose the legislation, with the organization urging the House to allow amendments when it comes to advocacy groups and nonprofits "such as the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, or the NRA." They argue that the bill as written would "chill" the ability for these groups to "name candidates when discussing issues like abortion, health care, criminal justice reform, tax reform, and immigration and to urge candidates to take positions on those issues or criticize them for failing to do so." As written, they say, the bill "interferes with that ability by impinging on the privacy of donors to these groups, forcing the groups to make a choice: their speech or their donors."
Among the other reforms: a non-binding resolution of support for D.C. statehood; "new rules and prohibitions on the [presidential] transition teams and inaugural committees"; allowing campaign funds for some personal costs like health insurance and child care to make running for office easier for people who aren't rich; same-day and automatic voter registration and an allowance for states to lower the voter registration age to 16; requiring "durable, voter-verified" paper ballots in federal elections; prepaid postage on absentee ballots; making lying to voters about voting processes—locations, dates, eligibility to vote—within 60 days of an election a crime; a Facebook provision "requiring public-facing websites with 50 million or more unique visitors a month to maintain a record of advertisers whose aggregate purchase requests exceed $500 per year"; requiring "online public disclosure of congressionally mandated reports, such as those from federal agencies or the Congressional Research Service, dubbed the think tank for lawmakers."
More transparency, better elections, tools to fight voter suppression—it's all there, though as the ACLU argues, it does need some tweaking. This is indeed what we elected a Democratic House to do. It won't see the light of day in Mitch McConnell's Senate, because transparency and fairness are an anathema to him. It is laying down important markers for a new Democratic trifecta—House, Senate, and White House—in 2020.