One main point of this new Washington Post column is that some specific provisions in the Senate Democrats’ bill might be both (1) unnecessary to safeguard democracy (even if desirable from a policy perspective) and (2) actually counterproductive to the goal of safeguarding democracy insofar as they potentially increase the risk of election subversion as a backlash effect of GOP hostility to voting procedures that they don’t trust being forced upon them by a Democrats-only vote in Congress. I use same-day registration as an example of this point.

The column’s second (and related) point is that, even assuming specific provisions are not likely to increase the risk of election subversion, if including them in the bill makes it more difficult to get across the finish line (including by means of some sort of filibuster reform that has yet been identified), then they risk sabotaging elements of the bill that are absolutely essential from a democracy-protecting goal–especially reducing the risk of election subversion.

As debate on the bill gets underway in the Senate, I hope there is a careful assessment of which provisions are absolutely key for democracy-protection in this respect, and which ones are not, so as not to jeopardize what will be the very difficult task of actually getting the essential elements enacted. If the goal of the bill is simply to have a messaging point to take into the 2022 midterms (“see, Republicans are against democracy, because they voted against our democracy-safeguarding bill”), I think that’s a big mistake. There are truly essential things that Congress needs to enact now (applicable to the midterm elections) to protect against the risk of election subversion, and it would leave the Republic gravely vulnerable to authoritarian power-grabbing on January 6, 2025 if any unnecessary or counterproductive elements of the bill undermine that top-priority objective.