On Sunday night, a disgruntled Florida Man could be found hollering about how the election in which he got 7 million fewer votes than his opponent was somehow stolen from him. A little over a month removed from his time in the world's most powerful office, it finally feels the right amount of absurd to listen to what Donald Trump has to say about any issue of national concern. That we ever had to pay attention to what some rich blowhard from the phony business teevee show has to say about Iran's nuclear capabilities is not a ringing endorsement for the health of the American democratic republic. Naturally, at this weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference, he and plenty of others railed against a bill currently making its way through Congress that would actually do something to shore up the health of that republic.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act, is set for a vote in the House of Representatives this week. The bill's sponsor, John Sarbanes, told me it's an amalgamation of what his constituents have told him, over and over, since he got to Congress in 2007: "We want to be able to vote for you, when you get there we want you to keep paying attention to us, and don't get tangled up in the money." Title one of the bill is the John Lewis Voter Empowerment Act, which would create automatic voter registration across the country, expand early and absentee voting, restore voting rights for felons, streamline the vote-by-mail process, and more. The bill also takes on partisan gerrymandering, which drives polarization and dysfunction in Congress, granting the power to draw congressional districts to independent commissions rather than party leaders who stand to benefit from hyper-partisan maps. The legislation takes on dark money and big money in our elections, introducing more transparency to the question of who—including big corporate entities—is spending millions to get people elected. It seeks to break the influence economy in Washington by introducing lobbying reforms.

When polled on these ideas, large swathes of the American republic support them. Sixty-eight percent expressed support for the package in one recent survey, including 57 percent of Republicans. So naturally, this is how Donald Trump—drainer of swamps, fighter for the common man—described the bill on Sunday night.

We have no time to waste. Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress are racing to pass a flagrantly unconstitutional attack on the First Amendment and the integrity of our elections known as H.R. 1. Do you know what H.R. 1 is? It’s a disaster. Their bill would drastically restrict political speech, empower the federal government to shut down dissent and turn the Federal Election Commission into a partisan political weapon. In addition, it virtually eliminates voter ID requirements nationwide. Effectively ends all registration deadlines. Can you believe this? Requires states to give ballots to felons. Automatically registers every welfare recipient to vote and puts unaccountable unelected bureaucrats in charge of drawing congressional districts. That’s going to be a lot of fun. This monster must be stopped. It cannot be allowed to pass.

The bill would "restrict political speech" only if you believe people and corporations have an inalienable right to spend millions of dollars to influence elections while keeping their identities a secret. It's not clear how the bill would shut down dissent, though it would seek to make the FEC more effective at enforcing election law. The bill would restore the voting rights of felons, which red-state Florida recently approved by referendum, and would register "every welfare recipient" only insofar as it would register all citizens to vote. It does try to remove some of the barriers to voting that Republicans have constructed in order to keep people from exercising their constitutional rights, so in that sense, it is partisan. But is that really the problem when Republicans have embarked on a partisan campaign to stop people from voting based on the functionally nonexistent problem of voter fraud? Shouldn't we operate on the baseline that all American citizens should be able to easily cast a ballot? And yeah, it would put "unelected bureaucrats" in charge of redistricting, rather than have elected officials choose who gets to elect them.

orlando, florida   february 28  former president donald trump addresses the conservative political action conference held in the hyatt regency on february 28, 2021 in orlando, florida begun in 1974, cpac brings together conservative organizations, activists, and world leaders to discuss issues important to them photo by joe raedlegetty images
Joe Raedle//Getty Images
Shockingly, this was not a constructive addition to the discussion around H.R. 1.

Trump was not alone at CPAC, as it seems the conservative infotainment slop machine has been fired up and aimed at H.R. 1. The conference's chief, Matt Schlapp, also pushed this bullshit and told attendees that he hoped that stopping H.R. 1 would be their big takeaway from the weekend's festivities. Ken Cuccinelli, formerly an unlawfully appointed member of the Trump administration, is running a $5 million disinformation campaign aimed at the bill with the backing of a couple of anti-abortion groups. And a lot of this stuff is quickly mixing in with The Big Lie. Just as Republican state legislatures are using the hallucination that the election was stolen as justification for launching voter-suppression campaigns, we can soon expect to see it used to oppose reform for voting and campaign finance at the federal level. Throw in some crap about how transparency in political spending constitutes an attack on the First Amendment, some states' rights rhetoric repackaged as boogedy-boogedy about "federal overreach," and you've got most of the strategy.

The sad fact is that, rather than respond to election losses by changing the party platform to better appeal to a majority of potential voters, the Republican Party is just doubling down on its attempts to rule from a minority position using entrenched structural advantages and cynical anti-democratic policy. Republicans will seek to take back the House through extreme partisan gerrymandering, where voters are grouped in districts to maximize the number of seats one party will get in Congress regardless of how many votes they get. This is already a major reason Republicans continually control some state legislatures, like Wisconsin, despite getting fewer votes. Senate Republicans have not represented a majority of American citizens since 1996, but they've controlled the upper chamber for much of that time and used that to stuff the judiciary full of supplicant judges. The judges then can rubber-stamp the anti-democratic policy once it becomes law, or in the case of the Supreme Court, enact it themselves by gutting the Voting Rights Act, further entrenching the party's power against public opinion.

And again, at the root of all this, a majority of Republican voters support the reforms contained in H.R. 1. It's the elected representatives who don't want campaign finance or lobbying reform, and they will lie through their teeth, over and over again, to prevent them from becoming law. Now that the right-wing machine is spending some time on the bill, you can expect the support among conservative voters to take a hit. But the question is how much, and if there were ever a scenario in which Republican members of Congress would vote for this anyway. Will there be enough Democrats, considering how much the party has gotten into the dark-money game in recent years? Will the Senate do what needs to be done and shitcan the filibuster, or at least carve out an exemption for legislation vital to the healthy functioning of our democracy? As Josh Silver of Represent.Us told me when we discussed H.R. 1 in January, the stakes are rather significant. "If we don't see sweeping reforms that are contained in this bill passed," he said, "we are fucked as a nation."

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Jack Holmes
Senior Staff Writer

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.