On Tuesday, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee will mark up S. 1, the Corrupt Politicians Act. Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar will offer a comprehensive “manager’s amendment” to address some of the concerns she’s heard from state-level election administration officials. Because amendments require a majority vote to be adopted, and because the Senate Rules and Administration Committee’s membership is evenly divided between the two parties, that amendment will likely die on a 9-9 tie vote. In fact, I’d bet that every amendment offered during the session will be voted down. That’s as it should be – this bill is so bad, on so many fronts, that there is no way to improve it by amendment. The only way to improve it is to kill it entirely.
It’s no wonder that congressional Democrats reserved the number “1” for this bill on both sides of the Capitol. H.R. 1, in the House, and S. 1, in the Senate, designate the bill as that piece of legislation that is the Democrats’ highest priority. And even a quick glance shows why Democrat leaders want to prioritize this bill – because if this bill were to be enacted into law, free and fair elections in the United States would be a thing of the past, and Democrats would have succeeded in tilting the playing field toward themselves in perpetuity.
In order to do that, they’re willing to muscle the bill through, despite public opinion in opposition to many of the provisions found in the legislation.
For instance, the bill overturns state-level voter identification requirements. Thirty-six states have implemented some form of voter identification law; all would be overturned by enactment of this bill. But a March Rasmussen poll showed that “75 percent of likely U.S. voters believe voters should be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote.”
Says Rasmussen, that’s actually an increase in support for voter ID from 2018, when 67 percent of likely voters said voters should be required to show photo identification before voting.
The really interesting thing here is that Democrat elites are so determined to pass this, they are willing to override the wishes of their own partisans. In the Rasmussen survey, 60 percent of Democrat likely voters support voter ID requirements – as do 69 percent of Black likely voters, and 82 percent of other minority likely voters.
In other words, Democrat elites like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer aren’t pushing this bill because their constituents are demanding it. Democrat elites are pushing this bill despite opposition from their constituents, because the elites know it will increase and solidify their own political power.
There are other provisions in the legislation that are similarly out of touch with public sentiment, but which are nevertheless included because, if enacted, they would strengthen the hold Democrat elites want to create for themselves over future elections.
For instance, I seriously doubt most voters would want to have their own votes diluted by adding illegal immigrants to the pool of eligible voters. Yet, that is exactly what this legislation would do, by requiring the automatic registration of everyone who uses certain government programs, including government programs that are not limited to citizens.
And let’s not forget public financing for political campaigns – welfare for politicians. This has been a liberal fantasy for more than 30 years now. The ultimate aim of the “reformers” who want to enact a public financing regime is not to “reduce the influence” of so-called “Big Money” in American politics, it is to end the private financing of political campaigns entirely. Why? So they can control what political speech is allowed, of course. Political speech with no funding behind it doesn’t make much of an impact in our mass communications society; once the private funding spigot is turned off, those who control the public funding spigot will control what ideas are allowed to be expressed in the public square. Want an example? Just look at how Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have stepped in to act as Thought Police against political speech they oppose. Now imagine those same exercises, with the coercive power of government added to them. That’s a scary thought.
Welfare for politicians, adding illegal immigrants to the voter pool, overturning voter identification requirements – just three of the many provisions in this bill that show its sponsors are out of touch with the voters they claim to represent. But when did that ever matter to Democrat elites?
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.