by Matthew Vadum
Welcome to the Left's election theft wish list.
The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed an outrageous legislative assault on fair elections and the First Amendment last week that would drive up the occurrence of the voter fraud Democrats increasingly rely on to win elections.
The House approved H.R. 1, dubbed the proposed “For the People Act,” on a strict party line vote of 234 to 193 on March 8. Conservatives quite correctly denounced the measure as a “voter fraud and election theft” wish list.
Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) trashed the bill, saying it would “unconstitutionally infringe on the speech and associational rights of many public interest organizations and American citizens.”
In a tweet, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) described H.R. 1 as the “Democrat Politician Protection Act,” after previously saying the measure was “a massive power grab.”
“What is the problem that we’re trying to solve here? We had the highest turnout last year since 1966 in an off-year election,” McConnell reportedly said March 6. “People are flooding to the polls … because they’re animated. They’re interested. This is a solution in search of a problem. What it really is, is designed to make it more likely that Democrats win more often.”
On the day the House passed the bill, McConnell repeated his vow never to allow the bill to move to the Senate floor for a vote. This means H.R. 1 will likely become a big issue for both parties on the campaign trail in 2020.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tweeted: “Democrats did not design #HR1 to protect your vote. They designed it to put a thumb on the scale of every election in America and keep the Swamp swampy.”
At a leftist pep rally, Democrat lawmakers lied about the nation’s voting system, whining about how difficult it is for their poor bumbling voters to produce valid identification at the polls, even though presenting ID is now a requirement in our society to do virtually anything worth doing.
"For months, for years, really for decades, millions of Americans have been looking at Washington and feeling like they've been left behind," said the principal author of the bill, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.). "Too many Americans have faced this challenge where getting to the ballot box every two years is like getting through an obstacle course."
“H.R. 1 restores the people’s faith that government works for the public interest, the people’s interests, not the special interests,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday in a rare moment of coherence.
We’ve been down this pothole-riddled road before.
Democrats used their newly won House majority to approve H.R. 1 with minimal public discussion of the measure, just as the newly inaugurated Bill Clinton rammed a massive overhaul of the electoral system through Congress a short time after taking office. Clinton acted at a time when voter participation was rising and there was no popularly expressed demand for reform. Clinton and Democratic lawmakers sandbagged the Republican opposition before lawmakers had much of a chance even to digest the sweeping legislation.
The so-called Motor Voter law Congress passed 26 years ago opened up new frontiers for voter fraud.
As John Fund wrote in his book, Stealing Elections:
Perhaps no piece of legislation in the last generation better captures the 'incentivizing' of fraud... than the 1993 National Voter Registration Act[.] ... Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official. Finally, states were limited in pruning 'dead wood' - people who had died, moved or been convicted of crimes - from their rolls. ... Since its implementation, Motor Voter has worked in one sense: it has fueled an explosion of phantom voters.And who pushed Motor Voter?
Small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven spearheaded the drive to pass the law. They believed that poor people and radical agitators had every moral right to game the electoral system in order to bring about change. Cloward didn't worry about fraud, either. "It's better to have a little bit of fraud than to leave people off the rolls who belong there," he said. President Clinton gave a shout-out to Cloward and Piven at the bill-signing ceremony in 1993 that both attended.
"Between 1994 and 1998, nearly 26 million names were added to the voter rolls nationwide, almost a 20 percent increase," according to Fund. Motor Voter has "been registering illegal aliens, since anyone who receives a government benefit [including welfare] may also register to vote with no questions asked."
H.R. 1 is even more ambitious than Motor Voter, according to a summary of the bill’s provisions in The Epoch Times.
It would make Election Day a federal holiday (actually, that’s not a terrible idea), mandate automatic voter registration and same-day voter registration, strip state legislatures of redistricting responsibilities and give those powers to independent commissions, forbid federal lawmakers from serving on corporate boards, and force U.S. presidents –wink, wink, President Trump— to release their tax returns.
“H.R. 1 expands access to voting in a number of ways, including forcing states to implement early voting, online voter registration, and ‘no-fault’ absentee balloting, or the issuance of absentee ballots without requiring a reason for their request,” according to the summary.
Christian Adams, a former Department of Justice civil rights attorney and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told lawmakers earlier this year that H.R. 1 is bound to boost fraud.
“The voter rolls are currently full of ineligible voters who have died or moved out of the jurisdiction where they are registered,” Adams said.
“H.R.1 would make the problem worse by stripping the power of states to manage their own voter rolls to keep them clean using well-established best practices, such as postal mailings and recurring inactivity of registrants in elections. H.R.1’s mandate that states stop using these tools is just bad public policy.”
According to the summary, “[t]he measure also requires eligible voters to be registered automatically through state driver’s license offices and welfare departments unless they affirmatively decline. Felons would be automatically registered upon release from prison, and prospective voters would be able to both register and vote on the same day, including on Election Day.”
The bill also “mandates federal funding to match small-dollar donations and would deposit the funding into campaign bank accounts. It further requires the disclosure of donors who give more than $10,000 to tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, such as 501(c)4 groups.”
Current tax law permits such so-called “dark money” donors to remain anonymous to shield them from political reprisals. The Supreme Court ruled in 1958 in NAACP v.
Alabama ex rel. Patterson that Alabama could not force the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People to hand over the names and addresses of all its members in that state.
But the Left is salivating at the prospect of using social media to hound conservative donors for daring to contribute to conservative causes.
Because terrorizing their adversaries is what leftists do.
Matthew Vadum, formerly senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273111/dem-house-passes-anti-democratic-election-overhaul-matthew-vadum
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