The creation of a voting rights act for the 21st century

The other voting rights bill Democrats have proposed is H.R. 1, known as the For the People Act, a massive bill that would overhaul American elections and how they’re financed. Here’s some of what the 800-page bill would do:

Make it easier to vote by creating national automatic and same-day voter registration, instituting protections against wrongful voter roll purges, mandating at least two weeks of early voting, requiring states to allow any eligible voter to vote by mail without an excuse, and restoring voting rights to the millions of Americans who have completed felony sentences.
Make votes count more equally by taking the redistricting process away from state legislatures and putting it into the hands of independent commissions.
Curb the influence of moneyed donors in politics by establishing publicly financed elections (funded by penalties for white-collar crimes), requiring public disclosure of donors who give $10,000 or more to organizations that engage in campaign-related spending, and expanding restrictions on paid political advocacy by foreign nationals.
Protect against potential corruption by requiring presidential and vice-presidential candidates to release at least 10 years of their tax returns.

The bill naturally has many critics, and not all of them are adherents of Trump’s stolen-election myth. First Amendment advocates, for example, have expressed concerns that the bill’s campaign finance provisions are overly broad, since the category of campaign-related spending could include paid speech that merely refers to a candidate in a discussion of a political issue.

“That means an ad criticizing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) for supporting immigration reform or criticizing Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for opposing the Equality Act could trigger disclosure of donors that gave $10,000 or more,” Kate Ruane and Sonia Gill of the American Civil Liberties Union write in The Washington Post. “We know from history that people engaged in politically charged issues become political targets and are often subject to threats of harassment or even violence.”

Supporters of the bill — which include Ruane and Gill — argue that such flaws are easily fixed. “Reasonable people might quibble with the wisdom of this or that provision in H.R. 1,” Justin Florence and Rachel Homer write for The Bulwark. “But H.R. 1 is a necessary step in protecting our political order because it reflects that the key tension is no longer left versus right, but democratic versus anti-democratic.”
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Without intervention on the scale of H.R. 1, some election experts fear the damage to American democracy could be difficult to reverse. “Today, disenfranchisement is algorithm-aided and technocratic, with highly paid lawyers and consultants seeking to find ways to raise the individual cost of each minority vote, while at the same time diminishing the electoral impact of each minority vote,” Vann R. Newkirk II writes in The Atlantic. “An America without robust legal tools to challenge such practices does not need cruder devices to disempower people of color. The future becomes one of tyranny by gaslight.”
What’s next

The House of Representatives passed H.R. 1 last week, and Biden on Sunday called on Congress to take up H.R. 4. But for either to pass the Senate, Democrats would have to eliminate or reform the filibuster, which two Democratic senators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona — have expressed opposition to doing.

The pressure on them from the rest of the party, however, will be intense. “There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights,” Representative James Clyburn, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, said this weekend. “If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.”
The New York Times