What Left-Wing Populism Looks Like

House Resolution 1, also known as the For the People Act, is House Democrats’ latest effort to further federalize and micromanage our governance. The enormous 571-page bill is a progressive wish list of new rules and regulations that would undermine the legitimacy and functionality of our entire electoral system. And it’s now set for a vote on the House floor.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leads Democrats in introducing proposed “For the People” legislation on Capitol Hill, January 4, 2019. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
House Democrats’ new election-reform plan, the so-called For the People Act, is an unconstitutional abomination.

The Constitution deliberately decentralizes power over elections as it does over most other areas of law, leaving states and localities to determine rules for when, where, and how to cast a vote. We have laws in place to stop racial discrimination and the like, but short of that, decentralization ensures that no single entity exerts too much influence over elections. Indeed, the reason it’s very hard to “hack” a presidential election is because it’s not a “national” election but 50 state ones.

H.R. 1 would strip states of their longstanding responsibilities as electoral gatekeepers by imposing one-size-fits-all rules. A key provision of the bill would require states to use independent commissions to design congressional districts. But the constitutional authority to draw districts rests with state legislatures, so the federal government can’t force states to use commissions. That would surely invite legal challenge as a violation of the anti-commandeering doctrine established by the Supreme Court in New York v. United States (1992) and reiterated just last year in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), which prohibits the federal government from conscripting state officials into carrying out preferred policies.

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What Left-Wing Populism Looks Like

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