The Senate Takes Up the For the People Act Next Week

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FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | June 17, 2021

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“Senators Schumer and Manchin must be persuaded to keep the small donor financing system in the For the People Act, the most important anti-corruption legislation since the 1970s.”

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) provided a list of items yesterday that he could support regarding the voting rights, money in politics, redistricting, and ethics reforms in S. 1, the For the People Act. The Senate is expected to take up S. 1 next week.

This has opened the door to negotiations by Senator Manchin with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Senator Schumer will move a motion to proceed to consider the legislation next Tuesday, but it will be blocked from reaching the Senate floor by a Republican filibuster. This effort is being made to start the Senate legislative process. Negotiations between Schumer and Manchin are expected to follow.

The Manchin list also showed that the pundits who have been telling us for weeks that S. 1 is dead were themselves dead wrong.

Left off Manchin’s “support” list is the small donor financing system in S. 1 for presidential, Senate, and House elections.

Senator Schumer told more than 80 New York organizations yesterday about S. 1 that “public financing is a vital part of that bill. I’m very strongly for it. And so yes, we have to get that done.”

But, there are serious concerns that Senator Schumer will end up dropping this essential anti-corruption reform in the coming negotiations. And that would result in ever-growing levels of corrupting political money flowing to influence Congress.

Campaign spending in the 2020 national elections shattered previous records with $14.4 billion spent on the presidential and congressional elections, more than twice as much as was spent in the 2016 national elections. Influence-seeking billionaires, millionaires, bundlers, lobbyists, Super PACs, dark money groups, and special-interest PACs played the dominate role in financing these expenditures.

H.R. 1/S. 1 creates a new a small donor, public matching funds system for financing federal elections. Providing officeholders with this alternative, noncorrupting way to finance their elections is the only way to stop officeholders from being deeply dependent on and obligated to influence-seeking big money funders.

Senator Manchin’s Senate predecessor in West Virginia, Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd, led an effort in 1987 and 1988 to enact the same kind of campaign finance reform legislation that is found in S. 1 today. That legislation was ultimately blocked by a Republican filibuster that involved Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

In 1988, Byrd described the stakes involved in enacting the legislation that still hold true today:

“The integrity of this institution is at stake. The integrity of the electoral and political process is at stake. The integrity of representative democracy is at stake. And the integrity of the people’s choice, the people’s choice in the selection of Senators, is at stake.”  

Senators Schumer and Manchin must be persuaded to keep the small donor financing system in the For the People Act, the most important anti-corruption legislation since the 1970s.

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