The overwhelming acceleration of challenges America faces from the broken political system is growing at a pace that makes one wonder if there will be any recovery.
“The for the People Act,” otherwise known as H.R.1, ensures that every eligible voter can cast a vote free from barriers, allowing our officials to work in the public interest by ending influence of big money in politics. There are three key aspects of H.R.1 every American should support.
Voting rights and election security: implements automatic voter registration in the U.S., felons have full voting rights restored, expands early voting, simplifies absentee voting, prohibits voter roll purges, ends partisan gerrymandering and modernizes the voting system.
Campaign finance reform: H.R.1 upgrades online political ad disclosure, creates publicly funded matching system for small-dollar donations, tightens rules on super PACs and restructures the Federal Election Commission to break the agency’s gridlock.
Congressional and executive ethics: Expands the conflict of interest law and divestment requirements, counters the evolving door between government service and private industry, and requires presidents to disclose their tax returns. The end result would lead to reduced medicine prices, enable Medicare for All to be established, prevent climate catastrophe, provide a living wage, hold Wall Street accountable and thwart the political power of corporations and the superrich.
The main deterrent to the For the People Act is Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell who said he’ll block the bill from coming to the floor for debate. His repeated, perverse, intentional inactions are why Congress is known as a “do-nothing Congress.”
Act for the good of the people. Call or write your congressional member and insist that H.R.1 is the public supported far-reaching reform that should be taken up in the Senate.
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