The 2021 “For the People Act” – HR 1 – is one of the worst bills ever given political life. Authors claim it would “expand Americans’ access to the ballot box” and indeed it does. It changes our elections into something akin to an open-air market, where every “individual” – not “citizen” – can vote. Its passage late Wednesday night proves again why nothing good ever happens when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lurks with her cartoon-sized gavel after dark.
No Republicans voted for this disaster and only one Democrat voted against it. The vote was 220-210.
The bill, which now goes on to the Senate, codifies nearly every election abnormality done in the name of COVID in the 2020 election on a national scale and much, much worse.
It punishes free political speech, much like impeaching President Trump for speaking at the January 6th Capitol “Save America” rally. And it unleashes the IRS to do political purity tests of groups vying for special tax status. Lois Lerner lives in this travesty of a bill.
The bill limits the ability to fight its provisions in court and federalizes elections, which are constitutionally the province of the states.
The bill is so vile that even the ACLU “found significant flaws that are detrimental to the health of our democracy,” though thought it could be fixed. The predictably Leftist Brennan Center loves it.
Here are the nine biggest reasons why it must be destroyed.
1. Bans Voter ID and Verifying Voters
The Heritage Foundation reports the bill bans voter ID and makes it a crime for a state elections official to reject someone’s registration to vote. The bill considers having to show identification as an “impediment” to voting. The Democrats don’t trust you to wash your hands and wear a mask but insist anyone signing a statement saying they’re who they say they are is good enough and old enough to vote.
2. Requires States to Register 16 and 17-Year-Olds
Sure, you may not want the kids to drive after dark, but the little tykes will be able to register to vote and vote under the language. No one can check. And in whose classrooms will they be when they sign up to vote for the very first time? Classrooms run by teachers’ unions.
3. Mandates Nation-Wide Election Day Registration
No ID, no checking, no waiting. On Election Day. How many ballots will elections offices need? No idea. How much chaos would it create? Untold amounts. It’s like coasting down a mountain road without brakes.
4. Mandates Mail-In Balloting, Unlimited Ballot Harvesting, Early Voting
HR-1 mandates mail-in balloting and allows ballot harvesting by third-person parties without verifying signatures of the voter – setting up a potentially disastrous chain of custody separation of a voter from a verified vote. Allows postmarked ballots up to ten days after the election. The bill requires a 15-day early voting window, which prevents people from getting late-breaking Joe-Biden-Is-Paid-by-China stories (even though Big Tech quashed The New York Post stories).
5. IRS Allowed to Impose Political Purity Tests
After the success of the Tea Party movement in the 2010 election, the Obama Administration minions in the IRS began making it more difficult to impossible for groups with “Tea Party” and “patriot” in their names to get special tax-exempt status under the IRS statutes. According to Heritage, HR 1 “permit[s] the IRS to investigate and consider the political and policy positions of nonprofit organizations before granting tax-exempt status, thus enabling IRS officials to target organizations engaging in First Amendment activity with disfavored views.”
Lois Lerner and “the Cincinnati office” live on forever under this bill.
6. Requires Registration of All ‘Individuals,’ Not ‘Citizens’
The Heritage Foundation finds that under HR-1 “all individuals (as opposed to “citizens”) from state and federal databases” would be registered to vote. The databases include the DMV, where illegal immigrants are commonly on the rolls; prisons, where prisoners who have just been released are allowed to vote before they’re off parole and probation – an unconstitutional overreach; Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid Services. The federal government would determine where you live for voting and tax purposes and the system would result in multiple duplicate registrations. Furthermore, the bill stymies the ability to cull through registration lists to determine ineligible voters.
7. Allows Drive-By Voting
Though the bill appears to allow anyone from anywhere to mail in a ballot, some people might want to drive by the elections office and insist on voting in person, but not get out of the car. The bill forbids any state from putting limitations on “curbside voting.”
8. Mandates Drop Boxes
If you think putting ballots in a mailbox is dicey, imagine permanent, unwatched drop boxes for ballots. Under this bill, each state would be required to “provide secure drop boxes” for federal elections. With expanded mandated early voting under this bill, not even Brinks could secure these things. Washington state, for example, uses such lockboxes, found in grocery store parking lots.
9. Doxes Contributors to Political Action Committees Chilling Free Speech
Never mind that there are very real concerns about safety to persons found to have contributed to an unpopular issue to the Left – the CEO of Mozilla comes to mind – but this aspect of the bill also runs contrary to the 1958 U.S. Supreme Court NAACP v. Alabama decision. The court said the “inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.” The ACLU and the Heritage Foundation agree that this aspect of HR-1 would chill free speech and put “onerous legal and administrative compliance burdens and costs on candidates, citizens, civic groups, unions, corporations, and nonprofit organizations” who do advocacy. Nancy Pelosi says this would get rid of “dark money” from elections.
There’s more horrible stuff in this bill, including teeing up cybercriminals to plunder mandated online voter registration rolls, banning culling dead and other ineligible voters from voter rolls, limiting the ability to fight this bill in court as mentioned above, and setting up the Orwellian sounding “Commission to Protect Democratic Institutions,” which would force judges to justify their decisions.
It is a federal takeover of elections and takes the worst features of 2020’s election chaos and makes them permanent.
