A week after an armed insurrection in the U.S. Capitol aimed at overturning the results of a free and fair election, incited by the Republican president and his Republican Congressional allies, who spent months spreading lies and misinformation about the voting process, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has decided to focus its attention on a duly-elected Democatic majority committed to protecting and expanding the right to vote, cleaning up Washington corruption and bringing about a new era of ethics, accountability and trust in our government.
Published just 24 hours after President Trump was impeached by a unprecedented bipartisan group of lawmakers for his role in fomenting last week’s violence, the Wall Street Journal released a highly misleading editorial opposing H.R. 1, the For the People Act, the most sweeping package of anti-corruption, voting, and ethics reforms in a generation.
Its overall message is no different than what President Trump’s has been for the last year: there are certain people who should be able to vote (those likely to vote for Republicans), and certain people who shouldn’t (those likely to vote for Democrats).
Here are the facts.
H.R.1 will modernize and secure our elections through automatic voter registration, standardize absentee and early voting rules, and prohibit common voter suppression practices.
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H.R. 1 would require states to implement automatic voter registration–a program already successfully in place in roughly 20 states and the District of Columbia. We’ll leave it for others to decide why the Journal felt like it was important to theorize that “anyone receiving food stamps” would be the people to benefit from such a system.
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So much of the confusion and misinformation about the voting process in 2020 stemmed from a lack of clear guidelines around the early and absentee voting process. H.R. 1 would simply standardize those rules by requiring all states to allow people to vote by mail if they choose to do so and setting a minimum early voting period (15 consecutive days). Among other things, this would help ensure no politician can try to reject electoral votes simply because they disagree with a state’s legislative effort to expand safe voting in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed nearly 400,000 Americans.
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H.R. 1 would prevent common forms of voter suppression, including voter caging and purging practices that claim to ensure the integrity of our elections while removing valid voters from voting systems. A 2020 report released by ACLU Georgia found that up to 200,000 people were potentially wrongfully removed from voting rolls there because of the state’s attempts to “clean up” their voter rolls.
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Far from having “no concern for ballot integrity” as the Journal claimed, in actuality H.R. 1 would shore up our voting systems by ensuring jurisdictions have the resources they need to to maintain their election infrastructure and maintain proper standards, and it would require backup paper ballots in every state.
H.R. 1 will bring transparency and accountability to our campaign finance system.
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In its Citizens United v. FEC decision, which has been repeatedly supported by this editorial page, the Supreme Court agreed 8-1 that transparency was an important part of our democracy. H.R. 1 simply says large donors–those who give $10,000 or more–to organizations that spend money on elections should be disclosed. People who can write five-figure checks aren’t your grocery store clerk or postal worker. They’re CEOs, lobbyists, and special interests trying to buy access and influence to skew the political process, and Americans deserve to know who they are. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”
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Other campaign finance provisions in the bill mentioned by the editorial–such as ending gridlock at the FEC and modernizing disclosure rules to reflect the changing nature of campaigns–are just common sense. Americans deserve accountability when it comes to our elections, and we don’t have that now. Additionally. our current campaign finance rules were written long before hostile foreign actors could use social media to buy ads to subvert our elections and we need to recognize that.
H.R. 1 recognizes that the 700,000+ tax paying U.S. citizens of Washington, D.C. should have voting representation in Congress.
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A week after hundreds of Capitol and Metropolitan Police officers–many of them Washington, D.C. residents–put their lives on the line to defend the heart of our democracy, the Wall Street Journal editorial page says they don’t deserve to have voting representation in Congress. Cafeteria workers and custodians (who had to clean up after the right-wing insurrectionists) who live in DC also go to work every single day to ensure Senators with a smaller population can get lunch and have a clean office.
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If given statehood, DC would become the state with the second-highest share of people of color in the nation. For too long, Black and Brown communities have been intentionally blocked from having their voice heard in our democracy. This would help to right that wrong.
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The city of Washington, D.C. is also home to over 31,000 veterans who served our country but are denied a voice in Congress.
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Granting statehood would simply carve out a federal enclave for government business while rightfully declaring the rest a state with the privileges that go along with that.
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