Republicans claim Democrats' voting rights bill is just a play to steal elections
With the end of President Donald Trump’s partial government shutdown, Democrats were finally able to get started on their legislative agenda on Tuesday. That meant Democrats and Republicans could get back to disagreeing about basically everything — beginning with the litany of voting rights, campaign finance and ethics reforms in the Democrats’ first major bill of 2019.
The House Judiciary Committee held an initial hearing on H.R. 1, the For the People Act. Tuesday’s hearing focused largely on the bill’s voting rights provisions, which fall under the committee’s jurisdiction. These measures aim to expand automatic voter registration, early voting and felon re-enfranchisement. The bill also endorses a restoration of the Voting Rights Act pre-clearance provisions that were gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013.
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Democrats invited Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Sarah Turberville, director of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, and Adav Noti, director of trial litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, to testify on the need to expand voting rights and enact other provisions of the bill.