For the People Act: protecting democracy

Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers claiming he won, is being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after she appeared on conservative media to sow doubt about the 2020 election results. Her defense? “Reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”

The courts did rule: Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and various Republican legislators filed and lost 60+ lawsuits, including decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court. No evidence was ever presented by Trump’s lawyers.

That hasn’t prevented Republican lawmakers in 47 states from proposing more than 361 laws that, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, would limit mail, early in-person, and Election Day voting, and impose such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours, and narrower eligibility to vote absentee. They also want to make it harder for voters to register, expand voter roll purges, and adopt practices that would enable improper purges. Many bills undermine the power of local officials; after county election officials conducted elections during a pandemic and resisted pressure to manipulate the results, lawmakers are now proposing new criminal penalties targeting those officials.

Congress is now debating the For the People Act which would protect democracy by making voting fairer and more inclusive. According to the Brennan Center, The Act upholds Congress’ power to protect the right to vote, regulate federal elections, and defend the democratic process in the United States. It notes that the Constitution gives Congress broad authority to regulate congressional elections, a power that the Supreme Court has recently affirmed, as well as the power to guarantee a republican form of government in the states and the power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment which protects the right to vote. It also emphasizes that both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments give Congress the power to eliminate racial discrimination in voting and the democratic process, which still persists in voting restrictions, redistricting, access to the polls, and felony disenfranchisement.

Republicans deny the laws are aimed at suppressing turnout, saying they are essential to improving public confidence in the integrity of elections, even in places where elections ran smoothly. On the contrary, historians believe the proposed laws would result in the most dramatic attack on voting since the late-19th century when Southern states effectively reversed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution’s prohibition on denying the vote based on race by enacting poll taxes, literacy tests, and other restrictions that disenfranchised virtually all Black men.

It was decades before Congress banned such laws and protected voting rights by passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other anti-discrimination laws. Voting rights advocates say the flood of new restrictions moving through state legislatures could undo much of that progress.

“There’s this risk that we’re witnessing the rollback of the ‘Second Reconstruction,’” said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, referring to the civil rights era of the 1960s. “It’s not exactly the same as the end of the first Reconstruction, and one has to hope that it won’t be. But there are enough parallels to be nerve-racking.”

We know what Trump thinks about making it easier to vote: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” He’s not concerned about whether or not the elections are secure; he’s just worried that if more people can vote, the Republican Party’s position of rule by the minority would come to an end.

But as Senator Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “In a democracy, when you lose an election, you try to persuade more voters to vote for you. You don’t try to ban the other side from voting.”

The Brennan Center pointed out that “Voter participation is distressingly low. The last midterm election saw the lowest voter turnout in 72 years. Pervasive gerrymandering determines outcomes in many elections even before voters show up at the polls. The explosion of political spending by a tiny fraction of Americans is staggering; the amount contributed by mega-donors who give six figures or more increased more than 12-fold between 2008 and 2016. Dark money now floods into all levels of elections, including state judicial races. The Supreme Court gutted a century of campaign finance law [in 2014] and a half-century of voting rights protections [in 2013] by a slim five-to-four margin…Millions of Americans from all political points of view feel that their voices are not heard, that the government fails to represent their concerns or meet their needs.”

Sections of the For the People Act deal with voting rights, election security, campaign finance reform, ethics, and gerrymandering. The Economist, a conservative magazine, endorsed the Act, writing that “making voting easy and secure ought to be the aim of any party committed to democracy” and arguing that, while the bill is not perfect, it would “restrict the ability of state parties to game voting laws.”

Mark Berg is a community activist in Adams County and a proud Liberal. His email address is MABerg175@Comcast.net.