Mitch McConnell’s Bad Bet on Democracy Reform

Republicans convinced that H.R. 1 is a “power grab” by Democrats have badly misread public sentiment.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s extraordinary jeremiad assailing the democracy reform bill known as H.R. 1 illustrates both the unbridgeable chasm that now divides Republicans and Democrats, and the deep cynicism and voter disconnect that define today’s GOP.

McConnell’s impassioned take-down of House Democrats’ “For the People Act” in a recent Washington Post op-ed sheds light on why he’s been content to let the government shutdown drag on so long. The moment the impasse ends, House Democrats will approve their bill to expand voting rights, encourage low-dollar campaign contributions, end gerrymandering, shed light on secret money and tighten up lobbying and ethics rules.

To McConnell, this would unleash a parade of horribles from privacy and free speech violations to error-riddled voting rolls, and public intimidation and harassment. The whole bill, as McConnell sees it, is a “partisan power grab” by Democrats who “want to rewrite the rules to favor themselves and their friends.”

It’s as if Republicans, having placed winning at all costs above all else for so long, cannot conceive that Democrats might advance H.R. 1 for any reason other than partisan self-interest. In making the case for Democrats’ bad motives, however, McConnell comes across as both remarkably out of touch with public sentiment, and as incapable of debating the topic honestly.

Let’s set aside for the sake of argument McConnell’s dubious opening claim that Republican tax cuts and deregulation have made “the nation thrive” — even as markets wobble, global debt piles up, and economists brace for a recession or all-out crash.

After all, unemployment remains at near-record lows, and maybe President Donald Trump’s trade wars, reign of chaos, and indefinite government shutdown won’t wreck the economy after all.

But McConnell’s assertion that Democrats are “taking aim at your wallet” because their democracy reform bill includes a modest plan to match low-dollar campaign contributions with public funding is laughable on its face. By one estimate, Democrats’ small-donor matching plan would cost $3 billion over ten years — or less than $1 per year, per citizen.

The GOP tax cuts, by contrast, are now projected to add $1.9 trillion to the national debt by 2028, when they will also start heaping higher taxes on many low- and middle-income Americans. If anyone’ “taking aim” at Americans’ wallets, it would seem to be Republicans.

McConnell voices special outrage over House Democrats’ plan to tweak the structure of the Federal Election Commission, whose 3–3 split between Republicans and Democrats has rendered the agency all but completely dysfunctional and ineffectual. The upshot, as outgoing Democratic Commissioner Ann Ravel wrote in a scathing report on leaving the agency, is that “candidates and committees are aware that they can ignore the laws enacted to protect the integrity of our elections.” No surprises there.

To rectify this, H.R. 1 would reduce the number of commissioners from six to five, with the proviso that “no more than 2 [two] may be affiliated with the same political party.” It would also give a nonpartisan “blue ribbon” advisory panel comprised of retired federal judges and other election law experts the power to recommend commissioners, among other changes aimed at professionalizing the agency.

From this, McConnell conjures the specter of a partisan, jack-booted FEC, empowered to “track and catalogue more of what you say,” to penalize “many more Americans” who spend “even small amounts of money on speech,” and to “forcibly publicize” the names of donors to nonprofits that stray over some “fuzzy” line into electioneering.

This portrayal of the toothless and moribund FEC as a menacing, Big Brother-style enforcer is a favorite GOP theme, but it’s an increasingly fantastical narrative in today’s rules-free campaign finance system, where unlimited, secret spending increasingly dominates.

It would be one thing if McConnell acknowledged that something needs to be done to fix the nation’s broken voting and election rules, while cautioning that reforms ought to be crafted carefully lest they tread on constitutionally protected First Amendment rights. Instead, McConnell chooses to cast the entirety of H.R. 1 as the “Democrat Political Protection Act.”

Never mind that poll after poll shows that Americans on both sides of the aisle now regard corruption in government as a top concern. Voter enthusiasm for democracy reforms was a leading factor propelling Democrats’ House takeover in the recent midterm. Democrats have placed H.R. 1 at the top of their agenda not to rig the rules in their own favor — something Republicans have excelled at lately — but because they see draining the swamp as a politically winning issue.

It’s a measure of the GOP’s growing isolation from the majority of Americans, as the party shrinks to represent an increasingly narrow base, that a leader as politically shrewd as McConnell should so badly misread the voters on this issue.

McConnell’s determination to defend unfettered, secret spending at all costs also clashes with Republicans’ supposed commitment to economic growth. If it’s a thriving economy McConnell’s after, facilitating corruption through secrecy and political money deregulation is not the way to cultivate it. That’s why a growing number of business leaders support political disclosure.

For a long time, Republicans have hidden behind the First Amendment and big government rhetoric to justify their opposition to the slightest expansion of voter protection, or of political money regulation. In McConnell’s world, making Election Day a holiday means “taxpayer-funded vacation for bureaucrats.” Curbing voter purges, which have swept millions of eligible voters off the rolls, will “make it harder for states to fix inaccurate data in their voter rolls.”

Increasingly, though, this is a parallel universe occupied by GOP leaders alone. To average Americans, the concerns at the heart of H.R. 1 — election security, secret money and foreign influence, voter suppression, gerrymandering, corporate political spending, ethics abuses — are increasingly urgent. McConnell’s tone-deaf railing against democracy reform is starting to ring hollow, even to Republican voters.