If they’re selfish and short-sighted enough to back a MAGA candidate in a Republican primary over one who voted to impeach Trump, they’re probably selfish and short-sighted enough to defeat the new Senate bipartisan bill designed to prevent the next January 6.
I wrote about that bill last week after it was announced. It’s almost unheard of in America 2022 for congressional legislation to have bouquets tossed at it from both sides of the aisle but the new Electoral Count Reform Act managed the trick. Conservative Yuval Levin called it a “very good set of reforms” while liberals Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman pronounced it “surprisingly good.” Top lawyers Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith swooned, declaring “it is difficult to imagine a more skillfully designed answer to the basic design challenge of ECA reform than the one produced by the bipartisan group.” And legal scholar Matthew Seligman, who’s written at length about flaws in the current ECA, gave it his seal of approval:
The election of 2020 and the calamitous events of January 6, 2021, were a clarion call for action to repair the catastrophic vulnerabilities in the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The bipartisan Senate group has answered that call to action.
— Matthew A. Seligman (@Matt_Seligman) July 20, 2022
The legislation is being marked up in committee in the Senate this week and then will need to compete for time on a jam-packed calendar as Schumer moves legislation like the semiconductor bill, whatever’s left of Build Back Better in Joe Manchin’s mind, and various must-pass legislation. There isn’t much time left for Senate business between now and Election Day. And although the bill could still conceivably pass during the lame-duck session, the results of the election may change the incentives for some senators who currently support it. Time is of the essence, in other words, if this thing is going to pass both houses of Congress and make it to Biden’s desk before January 3.
So here come House Dems to say: Hold your horses. We haven’t agreed to anything yet.
I hope figures like Jamie Raskin, Zoe Lofgren, and other Democrats on the January 6 committee understand that if they tank Congress’s attempt to reform the ECA, leaving America vulnerable to another insurrection, that’ll be their committee’s legacy. It won’t be Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony or the depositions shown at the hearings. It’ll be the fact that they let the perfect be the enemy of the good and refused to give up their dream of shoehorning voting rights reform into the ECA bill despite knowing that would be a poison pill for Republicans in the Senate.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) called the Senate effort “fine and necessary, but not remotely sufficient to meet the magnitude of the threat against democracy now,” citing the need to also push for voting rights changes.
“I don’t want to be overly critical, but I think there are some elements of what we’ve worked through that might be superior,” added Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who’s spearheading the select panel’s pitch to change the law that Trump backers used to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence. “So, hopefully, we’ll come up with a melded version that serves the country.”…
In the meantime, Senate aides familiar with the effort emphasized that the Collins-Manchin-helmed proposal is the only option likely to get the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster, and that the Jan. 6 panel has yet to release its alternative. And Democrats are anxious to pass something clarifying the law, given the ambiguities Trump tried to exploit have yet to be fixed…
“If people hold out and say ‘I’m not going to agree to anything that isn’t everything,’ then what that means is we might wake up on January 7th of 2025 in a brave new world. And once we’ve crossed that Rubicon, after a stolen presidential election, I don’t think we can go back,” [Matthew] Seligman said.
Raskin, you may recall, believes the electoral college is an “undemocratic relic,” a conviction that won’t help him attract Senate support for any House bill that’s yet to come. And as for Lofgren’s hope of “melding” the House and Senate bills in a conference committee, uh, what sort of time frame is she looking at here?
The January 6 committee doesn’t plan to offer its recommendations for reforming the Electoral Count Act until the fall, in fact,. Assuming that means September 1, that’ll give the chambers just two months to try to reach a consensus before Election Day. Endorsing ECA reform in an editorial this morning, National Review warned: “Nor should the Senate wait for a lame-duck session, when there might be disputes ongoing as to the outcomes of some midterm races. Avoiding serious election disputes, and promoting confidence in their swift and sure resolution, should not be a partisan issue. The time to fix the gaps in the roof is now, before the rains come again.”
It seems to me we’re about to relive the folly of House progressives last summer when they somehow convinced themselves that they had leverage over Joe Manchin on infrastructure negotiations. All they had to do was block the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Manchin wanted to see pass, they thought, and he’d surely make concessions on the Build Back Better social-spending bill that House lefties desperately wanted. But he didn’t make concessions. And eventually they realized that he wasn’t going to because, uh, they did not in fact have any leverage over him. Result: They caved on the bipartisan bill and BBB hasn’t passed to this day.
They’re in a similar situation now except it’s Senate Republicans more so than Manchin who have all the leverage. Do figures like Thom Tillis, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and other GOPers who support ECA reform want to see the new Senate bill pass for good-government reasons? Sure — but they know it’s not a political winner for them. They’re taking a risk in backing it, aware that Trump will oppose it vehemently. That being so, the bill likely represents the furthest they’re comfortably able to go politically to fix the rules that gave us January 6. So if Raskin breaks through the Senate wall like Kool-Aid Man and starts trying to tack provisions left over from H.R. 1 onto the bill, the bipartisan Senate consensus will dissolve and we’ll be left with another stalemate until House Dems once again grit their teeth and accept that they’ll have to eat whatever the Senate is willing to feed them.
So how about we cut to the chase and accept it now, hm? That’s not to say that suggestions for improving the bill can’t be made (Rick Hasen supports requiring all voting machines to produce a paper record of a person’s vote in order to thwart future conspiracy theories about rigged machines), but they should be made now during the Senate process rather than waiting for a long House debate. And the January 6 committee should use the August recess to publish their own recommendations for ECA reform as soon as possible, in the next few weeks, rather than wait until this fall. Chop chop.
I don’t know. Maybe Raskin’s bluffing, just to see how the Senate reacts? If so, I don’t think he’s going to like their reaction.
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