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House Democrats will unveil full details of their first bill in the new Congress on Friday — sweeping anti-corruption measures aimed at stamping out the influence of money in politics and expanding voting rights.
This is HR 1, the first thing House Democrats will tackle now that a new Congress has been sworn in. To be clear, this legislation has little to no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate or being signed by President Donald Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell already bluntly stated, “That’s not going to go anywhere.”
But by making anti-corruption their No. 1 priority, House Democrats are throwing down the gauntlet for Republicans. A vast majority of Americans want to get the influence of money out of politics, and want Congress to pass laws to do so. New polling from the PAC End Citizens United found 82 percent of all voters and 84 percent of independents said they support a bill of reforms to tackle corruption.
Given how popular the issue is, and Trump’s multitude of scandals, it looks bad for Republicans to be the party opposing campaign finance reform — especially going into 2020.
“Our best friend in this debate is the public,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters recently. “We believe it will have great support.”
The issue is being spearheaded by Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes, a longtime advocate of campaign finance reform who has disavowed corporate PAC money for years. Sarbanes and other House Democrats have been working with progressive heavy hitters in the Senate including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose own wide-ranging anti-corruption Senate bill was recently introduced in the House by Sarbanes and progressive Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal. He is also working with Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) to introduce a companion HR 1 bill in the Senate, which will likely not even be brought to the floor.
Sarbanes and Democrats know McConnell is refusing to work with them on their anti-corruption bill, and they believe it’s good politics for them.
“You could stamp on this thing, ‘McConnell rejected it,’ and it would immediately give it more credibility,” Sarbanes told reporters recently. “We built this not for McConnell...this was built for the public. He’s going to get knocked over by where the sentiment of the country is right now.”
What this anti-corruption bill aims to do
HR 1 will be formally introduced later today by Pelosi, Sarbanes, and chairs of the committees of jurisdiction for the bill: Reps. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Jerry Nadler (D-NY).
The bill will make its way through their committees in the coming weeks; Sarbanes hopes to have a final floor vote done later this month or early February.
The bill covers three main planks: campaign finance reform, strengthening the government’s ethics laws, and expanding voting rights. Here’s the important part of each section.
Campaign finance
- Public financing of campaigns, powered by small donations. Under Sarbanes’s vision, the federal government would provide a voluntary 6-1 match for candidates for president and Congress, which means for every dollar a candidate raises from small donations, the federal government would match it six times over. The maximum small donation that could be matched would be capped at $200. “If you give $100 to a candidate that’s meeting those requirements, then that candidate would get another $600 coming in behind them,” Sarbanes told Vox this summer. “The evidence and the modeling is that most candidates can do as well or better in terms of the dollars they raise if they step into this new system.”
- Support for a constitutional amendment to end Citizens United.
- Passing the DISCLOSE Act, pushed by Rep. David Cicilline and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, both Democrats from Rhode Island. This would require Super PACs and “dark money” political organizations to make their donors public.
- Passing the Honest Ads Act, championed by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Mark Warner (VA) and introduced by Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA) in the House, which would require Facebook and Twitter to disclose the source of money for political ads on their platforms and share how much money was spent.
- Disclosing any political spending by government contractors and slowing the flow of foreign money into the elections by targeting shell companies.
- Restructuring the Federal Election Commission to have five commissioners instead of the current four, in order to break political gridlock.
- Prohibiting any coordination between candidates and Super PACs.
Ethics
- Requiring the president and vice president to disclose 10 years of his or her tax returns. Candidates for president and vice president must also do the same.
- Stopping members of Congress from using taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment or discrimination cases.
- Giving the Office of Government Ethics the power to do more oversight and enforcement and put in stricter lobbying registration requirements. These include more oversight into foreign agents by the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
- Creating a new ethical code for the US Supreme Court, ensuring all branches of government are impacted by the new law.
Voting rights
- Creating new national automatic voter registration that asks voters to opt out, rather than opt in, ensuring more people will be signed up to vote. Early voting, same-day voter registration, and online voter registration would also be promoted.
- Making Election Day a holiday for federal employees and encouraging private sector businesses to do the same, requiring poll workers to provide a week’s notice if poll sites are changed, and making colleges and universities a voter registration agency (in addition to the DMV, etc), among other updates.
- Ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections and prohibiting voter roll purging. The bill would stop the use of non-forwardable mail being used as a way to remove voters from rolls.
- Beefing up elections security, including requiring the director of national intelligence to do regular checks on foreign threats.
- Recruiting and training more poll workers ahead of the 2020 election to cut down on long lines at the polls.
HR 1 is intended to be a large package, but Sarbanes said in addition to passing it as the first bill, members will likely break out pieces of it into smaller bills that individually could get bipartisan support from Republicans in the Senate — things including the Honest Ads Act and boosting election security.
“We’re seeing more political spending go to the internet and we have clear evidence that foreign actors tried to influence the election through the internet,” said Kilmer, the Democrat who introduced the Honest Ads Act in the House. “The last Congress, you saw a committee hearing grilling the Facebook CEO but [it] didn’t really do anything to fix the problem.”
Although Kilmer believes the Republican Senate should take HR 1 as a whole package, he’s glad to see individual elements being broken out.
“The combination of having some [bills] like that plus having a powerful push out of the gate the public responds to in a positive way creates political pressure for Republicans to get on board,” Sarbanes told Vox. “They are going to discover this sort of thing is popular back in their district.”
Democrats want to “walk the walk”
The anti-corruption reform effort is nothing new for Sarbanes, who stopped accepting PAC money seven years ago and once joined a frigid walk in zero-degree weather across part of New Hampshire to commemorate Doris “Granny D” Haddock, the late activist who trekked across the entire nation to make a point about campaign finance reform.
The influence of lobbying and money has been entrenched for years on both sides of the aisle, but Republicans especially have been in the news for it. Vox’s Tara Golshan and Dylan Scott noted a total of four House Republicans who were embroiled in corruption scandals before the midterms — two, Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter, were reelected despite those scandals.
But even though they have a good foil in House Republicans, Sarbanes has long said his party needs to undergo a serious reckoning of its own.
“Walk the walk, and we’ve got to walk it quick,” he told Vox. “A lot of [voters] don’t believe it can happen because the system is rigged. That’s why when you come with a plan for that, too, it sort of caffeinates everything else. It makes them feel like, okay, now you’re talking.”
“It’s not until you come here and begin to serve that you understand how woven it is into the fabric of how Washington operates,” Sarbanes continued. The Congress member compared his own refusal of PAC money to putting on “night-vision goggles that have you then see how money flows everywhere here.”
Democrats know they don’t actually have a shot of passing HR 1 through the Senate, or getting it past the president’s desk. But they recognize they need to get serious about the issue, even if Republicans won’t.
“To say to the public, from this point forward, if you give the gavel to lawmakers who are interested in being accountable to you, this is the kind of change you can expect to see,” Sarbanes said. “If you like this, give us a gavel in the Senate and give us a pen in the White House.”
Expect to hear this argument well into 2020.
