Democrats in Congress face hard choices about how to proceed with enacting President Biden’s agenda after Republicans successfully blocked the Democrats’ election overhaul bill, the For the People Act, from advancing in the chamber on Tuesday.
Senate Democrats now turn to the budget reconciliation process to circumvent the legislative filibuster and pass key parts of Biden’s agenda.
Some Republicans are already opposing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, H.R. 4, as an alternative to the For the People Act, referred to as H.R. 1 in the House and S.1 in the Senate.
“If you put the federal government in charge of everything, again, they will gut things like voter ID laws, they’re going to make it more difficult to maintain accurate voter files, they’re going to require ballot harvesting,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson told Just the News.
Conservatives view H.R. 4 as H.R. 1 in disguise.
“I think that we should resist any temptation to have a federal takeover of elections, and whether that’s called H.R. 1 or H.R. 4 doesn’t particularly matter to me,” Jason Snead of the Honest Elections Project told Just the News. “I think that right now, what you see on the progressive left is the treatment of H.R. 4 as the backup plan.”
“It’s allegedly about finding discrimination in voting, and yet it does not use any objective metrics to figure out which states are supposedly discriminating in voting,” said Snead. “Instead, it targets practices like voter ID laws and procedures to clean up voter rolls.”
Snead also said H.R. 4 would give the federal government the power to prevent states from implementing a requirement for voters to show an ID to cast a ballot.
Democrats are likely more motivated now to push a partisan reconciliation bill through Congress without GOP votes after the GOP stopped the Democrats’ election overhaul effort using the legislative filibuster. A bill that passed the Democrat-led House to set up a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot also recently failed to advance in the Senate. Read more…
