McConnell in attack-dog mode on House Democrats first big bill

It’s not fair to say the Senate is doing nothing under Mitch McConnell other than confirming judges.

The Republican Senate Majority Leader has devoted much of his time lately to fashioning talking points to attack the Democrats’ top piece of legislation in the House, a wide-ranging bill dealing with reforms to campaign finance, ethics and voting rights.

McConnell gave seven floor speeches in the Senate in the weeks leading up to the vote in the House on Thursday. And before House Democrats even brought their first major bill of the new Congress to the House floor for a final vote on Friday, McConnell strode to the Senate floor once again to denounce it, even though he has promised he won’t ever allow it for even a vote in the upper chamber.

“Anyone who's been observing the floor of the Senate would have noticed how vociferously our Republican leader opposes HR1,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said from the Senate floor Thursday morning, referring to the For the People Act.

Why all this energy for a bill that won’t be going anywhere in this Congress?

It appears that McConnell’s passion for the House bill is due to the fact that the Democrats’ bill campaign finance sections deal with a number of issues that have long animated him: the debate over dark money, government oversight and control of election ads and spending, and public financing of campaigns.

“This is an issue that I’ve dealt with for decades,” McConnell told reporters Wednesday. One former top aide to McConnell said he feels it is his duty to be the Republican Party’s attack dog on these issues.

“He hates campaign finance reform more than anything,” said one top House Democrat leadership aide.

But McConnell has also taken aim at the Democratic arguments about voting rights, laying out the case for a rebuttal of Democratic claims that voter suppression is a growing problem since the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. The Shelby decision weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act by declaring outdated the guidelines that triggered Justice Department oversight of states and counties with histories of racial discrimination, largely against African-Americans.

In fact, McConnell has made one of the most robust arguments in American politics to date to push back against growing claims that Republicans in certain states have been intentionally suppressing the vote with increasing success since 2013. This case has been building for a few years, helped by things like a court decision in North Carolina that found the state legislature there crafted a voter ID law in 2013 — the same year Shelby was decided — that targeted African-American voters with “surgical precision.”

Then, in 2018, elections in Georgia and South Dakota offered new evidence for Democratic arguments that Republican state officials were using legal means to make it harder for minorities to vote, usually in the name of preventing voter fraud.

McConnell’s Feb. 7 floor speech was his most thorough argument against the Democratic narrative.

“If you only listened to Democrats, you might actually think that there is a widespread voting crisis in this country,” McConnell said. He argued that “2018 saw the highest midterm turnout rate in half a century” and that “2016 hit an all-time record for presidential ballots cast and the third-highest presidential turnout rate in 50 years.”

McConnell praised what he called “the freedom, openness, and availability of the electoral franchise across our country in the year 2019” and said that “the procedures [Democrats are] trying to attack actually could not be more reasonable.”

McConnell’s arguments against the voter suppression narrative are of interest in part because while HR1 does have some provisions related to the issue — creating automatic voter registration, making Election Day a national holiday, and mandating redistricting rules — it is in many ways a prelude to a bigger bill on the issue that will come later this year: HR4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act.

That bill will seek to address the issues dealt with in Shelby, particularly the issue of updating formulas for triggering federal oversight of elections.

Nonetheless, McConnell has grounded his argument against HR1’s voting rights provisions in the constitutional argument that Article 1, Section VI gives state governments “primary responsibility” for the conducting of elections.