“Trump urges Republicans to double-down on fake election fraud narrative”/H.R. 1 Friendly Critics

Zach Montellaro:

Trump continues to cling to his lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent — and is pushing the rest of the Republican Party to join him. “Sadly, the Election was Rigged, and without even going into detail, of which there is much, totally game changing,” Trump said in a statement on Saturday, where he called much of the federal judiciary “gutless” (including the Supreme Court), for not backing his bunk claims. “No wonder so much money is being raised on this issue, and law-abiding people have every right to do so!”

Trump was responding to a story from The New York Times, which reported that right-leaning groups were finding that the “center of gravity in the party,” as one strategist put it, was pushing new restrictions on voters’ access to the polls, many of which have been predicated on Trump’s lie. The drive “is now at the heart of the right’s strategy to keep donors and voters engaged as Mr. Trump fades from public view and leaves a void in the Republican Party that no other figure or issue has filled,” The New York Times’ Jeremy W. Peters wrote.

And while Trump may remain banned on Twitter, he has shown that he does not need it when it comes to his main focus of advancing his electoral fraud claims, and integrating them within the conservative movement at large. That includes everything from his CPAC speech last month, where so-called “election integrity” efforts were one of the major topics of discussion throughout the event.

Expect Republican candidates’ stance on Trump’s lies to be among the most prominent litmus tests in GOP primaries. ….

One thing to watch: Is there a universe in which pieces of H.R.1 are chunked off and pushed through as standalone bills? Noted election law professor Rick Hasen floated the idea of a more targeted piece of legislation in an op-ed in The Washington Post, writing that not doing so runs the risk of nothing getting passed. In conversations Score has had with aides and activists, not many seemed to be entertaining that idea yet. But the battle over S.1 in the Senate is just beginning — there is a Senate Rules hearing on Wednesday — so any ultimate outcome isn’t close to being clear yet.

— Some who are supportive of the ethos of the bill are nevertheless raising concerns with it. VoteBeat’s Jessica Huseman, writing in The Daily Beast, touches on some election administrators’ complaints with deadlines and funding within the package: “The sections of the bill related to voting systems — wholly separate from its provisions on voting rights — show remarkably little understanding of the problems the authors apply alarmingly prescriptive solutions to. Many of the changes the bill demands of election administrators are literally impossible to implement. Others would significantly raise the cost of elections but provide no assured long-term funding.”

“The devil is in the details. There are aspects of HR1 that if they went into effect, wouldn’t necessarily affect states like mine. … We have to make sure, though, that we are not creating unintended consequences, and creating less opportunity,” one Democratic secretary of state told me last month. “Those of us that are in support of the principle of HR1, we want to work closely with Congress, to make sure that states that have very accessible election systems in place, that those are protected, that those aren’t unintentionally altered to the negative.”

The ACLU has also raised concerns with some of the speech-related aspects of the bill, first in 2019, and recently in an op-ed in The Post from Kate Ruane and Sonia Gill, senior legislative counsels at the organization. The duo praised the bill’s sections on voting rights, public campaign financing and more, but said there are “significant flaws that are detrimental to the health of our democracy and will likely have unintended consequences on the political rights of noncitizen immigrants as well as many nonprofits.”

Share this: