Stealing the 2020 Presidential Election was a rousing success for the Democrats. Because of that they are attempting to ensure that they will have an easy time stealing all future presidential elections. Their first attempt, the For The People Act, failed a couple months ago. They are at it again with the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which is a rather repulsive name for this partisan refuse. The sole purpose of this law is to overturn and outlaw all attempts to secure federal elections through measures such as Voter ID laws and cleaning up voter registration roles.
I first learned about this craven attempt at election theft from this action alert from the Heritage Foundation Stop H.R. 4, a Federal Veto of State Election Laws
H.R. 4 is a Leftist scheme to give President Biden’s bureaucrats in the federal government VETO power over state election integrity laws. Biden’s politicized lawyers in the Justice Department would use this veto power to overturn state voting laws they politically disagree with, such as extremely popular voter ID laws.
H.R. 4 would accomplish this by altering and weaponizing the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 for the Left’s partisan political gain.
This is a dangerously effective tactic, because the Voting Rights Act is generally a good and popular law. By stealing its good name for their new bill and partisan power grab, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer hope to gain mainstream America’s support by default.
It is exceedingly odious that this partisan nonsense invokes and changes the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because the original law:
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act made it illegal to deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race or color. Section 2 reinforces and strengthens the protections in the 15th amendment. And importantly, section 2 is still law (as it should be!).
When most people think of the VRA, section 2 is usually what they think of. With H.R. 4, Pelosi seeks to weaponize lesser known provisions of the VRA (sections 3, 4, and 5).
Here are the changes that this new legislation would make to the original Voting Rights Act.
H.R. 4 would change Section 3 to enact a fast and loose definition of discrimination. Under this new “disparate impact” definition, a voting law that applies to all equally, but potentially results in a statistical difference in impact, would now be in violation of the VRA. Under this loose definition, the federal government is given wide latitude to invalide state election laws without showing any actual intent to discriminate.
Furthermore, H.R. 4 would change the coverage formula for “preclearance” found in section 4, which determines which states the federal government essentially has veto power over. The power of preclearance is found in section 5 of the VRA, and it essentially creates a federal veto power over the election laws of certain states.
As you can see the whole notion of preclearence in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was exploited by the Obama Administration to a overturn attempts to make elections more secure. The Obama Administration’s abuse of preclearence was so over the top it was struck down by the Supreme Court. This new legislation is just an end run around the Supreme Court
Preclearance is the process by which several states with a past history of voting rights violations were required by the VRA in the 1960’s to get pre-approval from the Department of Justice (DOJ) before they changed any state voting law.
Preclearance was originally supposed to expire after five years, but Congress extended it several times.
During the Obama years, Attorney General Eric Holder abused preclearance as a personal veto to stop states from passing common-sense voting reforms and lawsuits were filed challenging preclearance.
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court found section 4 of the VRA unconstitutional. Because the formula for selecting states for preclearance had never been updated since the 1970’s, states were being continually punished for 50-year old mistakes that had been long rectified.
After Shelby County, Leftist partisans in the federal government no longer had veto power over state election laws, and states were able to pass many common-sense reforms, like voter ID.
The Federalist has come out swinging against this latest attempt by Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats to steal elections How H.R. 4 Would Let Leftist Extremists At The DOJ Control The Entire Nation’s Elections
Why are Democrats in Congress staging a series of show hearings to generate support for H.R. 4, “The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act”? Because, they claim, there is a wave of “voter suppression” going on across the country.
That is nothing more than a political fabrication. Requiring voters to show ID to authenticate their identity, or trying to ensure voter registration rolls are accurate and up-to-date, are not “voter suppression” and don’t prevent any eligible individual from registering and voting.
H.R. 4 isn’t just unnecessary and unjustified. It’s a dangerous bill that would give the partisan bureaucrats of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department administrative veto powers over states’ changes to election procedures.
As Cleta Mitchell noted in The Federalist earlier this month, H.R. 4 is “even more insidious” than its cousin, H.R. 1, precisely because “it would enable the vastly well-funded Democrat ‘voting rights’ apparatus to control American elections.” This control would extend over states’ election integrity measures like voter ID (even if passed by ballot referenda approved by all of the voters of a state).
