[Underscore]

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House Democrats unveil their first bill in the majority: a sweeping anti-corruption proposal

Democrats will take up voting rights, campaign finance reform, and a lobbying crackdown — all in their first bill of the year.

Spoiler:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...ll-hr-1-pelosi

[Liam-]

It begins

[Oliver_W]

Isn't that like turkeys introducing a Christmas and Thanksgiving bill?

[Maru]

As always the devil's in the details. Just a couple of things, not that it matters... House legislation during "split" years tends to be nothing put partisan sh**posting, it's never meant to be passed. In fact, parties tend to be more "frank" about their true positions in a split year than they would normally be when in power, so it's a bit of an "enticement" to their party base to put them back into power the next go-around. So yeah, I find these to be fun reading from a troll's perspective...

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. “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.”

On it's face, I don't see how the Republicans could pass this given their platform, but stranger things have occurred with our parties with regards to blowing up the deficit and "politics". So maybe this will end up in the next "budget" ... yeah.... America doesn't budget...

Passing the DISCLOSE Act, pushed by Rep. David Cicilline (RI) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), both Democrats from Rhode Island. This would require Super PACs and “dark money” political organizations to make their donors public.

I don't see any issue with this on it's face, but I don't know that much about campaign finance.

Passing the Honest Ads Act, championed by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (MN) and Mark Warner (VA), which would require Facebook and Twitter to disclose the source of money of political ads on their platforms, and share how much money was spent.

Oh man. It depends on how exactly they define "political" ads. Because a general "spot" for a private citizen advertising their own channel which happens to be politics-based is bit different than running an ad for a candidate currently on the ballot. I don't think they would be that broad with any definition, but it's politics so it's often wiser to be skeptical...

Ethics

Requiring the president to disclose his or her tax returns.
Stopping members of Congress from using taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment cases or buy first-class plane tickets.
Giving the Office of Government Ethics the power to do more oversight and enforcement and put in stricter lobbying registration requirements.
Create a new ethical code for the US Supreme Court, ensuring all branches of government are impacted by the new law.

@Bold It would depend on how this is written. Democrats have a tendency to write in their own version of "ethics" into things that is quite toxic/acidic to civic function. Especially down on the local level.

Democrats also have a tendency to see the Supreme Court as a revolutionary sledge hammer for introducing broad-sweeping federal rulings/regulations when it's sole function is really just "interpretting" cases based on unforseen circumstances with current law based on old texts/rulings... it's not meant to be "rewrite" the Constitution to say what we want it to say. That said, I don't agree with Roe Vs Wade ruling at all, because it was just a sh*te interpretation, but I don't know that it should be overturned if it's "settled 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 and online voter registration would also be promoted.
Restoring the Voting Rights Act, part of which was dismantled by a US Supreme Court decision in 2013. Ending partisan gerrymandering in federal elections and prohibiting voter roll purging.
Beefing up elections security, including requiring the Director of National Intelligence to do regular checks on foreign threats.

@First Bold This sounds good in theory, but it would wreak havoc on state sovereignty with regard to elections. Again, slowly heading down that path of broad-sweeping federal oversight in every aspect of American life. The reason why we register (primarily) is for 1) state mandates, local elections & primary elections, 2) proof of residence & 3) voter privacy... for example, depending on how we register, determines which elections we can and can't vote in. In TX, I can choose to vote in any party during the primary without changing my "affiliation", but I can't suddenly then go change to another option for the run-off/subsequent primaries... I forget how it shakes out, but we can only change so often, but it's not very long it's just for that election "season".

The other thing is, if the feds have control over voting, this takes power from the states. If you remember, Trump requested voter data in order to "investigate" voter fraud... it's not in our interest to pass a federal mandate on automatic registration. It sounds innocuous, but it will lead eventually to states losing their voice... which is what supports individual rights in a representative-democracy...

More than 20 states reject “voter fraud” commission's request for data
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/more-th...uest-for-data/

The foreign threat thing might be overkill. "Regular checks". What does this even mean? Do we mean once a year they look and see if the machines have been compromised? Something that is probably done anyway?...

I think what would be more really more helpful is to pass legislation to get counties that are still using paper ballots completely moved over to digital. Like Broward should never have happened for the umpteenth time. A misread vote is likely far more prevalent than a fraudulent one... imo... and the whole ballot "marking" exercise is a bit dumb in terms of integrity.

Granted, we had issues with machines here locally automatically selecting certain candidates even if that person decided to vote straight-party. Probably because the person decided to start changing pages before the machine "populated" all the selections... so we were told to wait until things "loaded" before we changed the page if we wanted to do straight-party vote.

Again, all this sounds good on paper, but with the split majority, the Democrat tactic (and Republican too I think to a large extent) is probably to cause more chaos and confusion and do it to embarass the opposition... Not a dumb tactic. It's worked before. These "bills" are a sort of "precursor" to what is going to happen with Season X of The Full House... lots more tasty drama to be sure. Probably I will ignore most of what happens during Season X, but I do like to occasionally read the nonsense that our Congress tries to push through during these split bullsh*t years... if you understand the details and the context they fit in, it's like watching political trolling at it's finest... the media almost never covers it because most people don't actually read the bills of opposition parties, much less their own party. So media-watching is pretty boring during lame duck Congress years... and not even everything that is written would be passed in a "normal" Congress... I think I like split years more than a normal majority for legislation, just because the partisan stuff is more "blatant" and a whole lot of peacocking... and I think more informative than when there is a majority... but on the whole, our legislative branch have been very dysfunctional in the past few decades... but lameducks are almost always a sh**show... some politicians have said they feel the best legislation though gets done during split years, so we'll see... I would not have a problem with this package of bills if actual cooperation and bipartisanship occurs so that there is a moderate voice in it, but we'll see...