H.R. 1/S. 1: Democrats defend their majorities, not honest elections

What is the No. 1 priority of every politician? If you guessed, “getting reelected in perpetuity,” give yourself an A. That’s why the Democrats’ first legislative priority — literally H.R. 1 and S. 1 — is to protect their new congressional majorities with a bristling defensive perimeter as high and impenetrable as the heavily guarded metal fence that recently surrounded the U.S. Capitol.

Start with congressional redistricting. Democrats spent half a billion dollars trying to flip state legislatures in 2020, with the goal of running the table on redistricting. But their ballyhooed “Flip ‘Em All” campaign failed to flip a single state chamber, leaving Democrats with control of the redistricting pen for just 17 percent of seats. No problem: S. 1 would rip redistricting away from state legislatures and hand the job to “nonpartisan” commissions that Democrats have previously manipulated to produce more favorable district lines. If you can’t win at the ballot box, just steal it by federal law.

S. 1 also dictates one-size-fits-all election rules in all 50 states and eviscerates time-tested safeguards like voter ID requirements, periodic updates of voter files, and restrictions on fraud-prone ballot harvesting. Democrats claim they just want to prevent “voter suppression.” Yet voter turnout has been rising steadily even before the mail-in ballot blowout of 2020. So why weaken election safeguards on a national scale? If you can’t verify voters’ identities, clean up voter files or prevent ballot harvesters from dropping off satchels of questionable ballots, not only will there be huge opportunities for election fraud, but there will be no way to detect it.