It’s time to craft another exception. Now that the landmark HR 1, the “For the People Act,” has passed the House and is headed for the Senate, the time has come for a parallel reconciliation exception for an even more fundamental category of legislation: the ethics, rule of law and fair election provisions that are central to our democratic republic.
Call it democracy reconciliation. Without it, we cannot fix what is broken in our elections and our government.
We start with the premise that voting protections, campaign finance limits and ethics rules for federal officials are all badly broken. The authors of this column include former White House ethics chiefs for President George W. Bush and for President Barack Obama. We watched (and spoke out) with horror during the past four years of attacks in all those areas by President Donald Trump, his cronies, and his enablers. They did great damage to a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Voter suppression in particular has become the standard operating procedure of Republican political operatives and the candidates they support, with Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen inspiring 253 needless proposed bills in 43 states to end mail-in voting and otherwise suppress free and fair elections.
Making matters worse, the legislative options available to Congress for the big money that infects our politics are considerably narrowed by an activist Supreme Court. In the 2010 Citizens United case the court struck down key portions of a campaign finance reform bill passed 20 years ago and cosponsored by Senator and later Republican presidential nominee John McCain. The same lobbyists and corporations, even foreign-controlled ones, who fund this gusher of cash also exert undue influence over the government and poured vast amounts into the most recent ex-president’s political and business coffers.
HR 1 and its Senate version, S 1, will address these exact voting, campaign finance and ethics concerns….
Read the full article at rss.cnn.com
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