When the new Congress convenes in January, the very first item on its to-do list will be H.R. 1, a package of good-government and election reforms unveiled Friday by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and a group of legislators led by John Sarbanes, of Maryland. Its contents haven’t been fully composed yet, but Pelosi and Sarbanes previewed its three parts in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this week: a voting-rights plank that includes updates to the Voting Rights Act, measures to address gerrymandering, and automatic voter registration; an ethics plank that requires the President to disclose his or her tax returns and bans the use of taxpayer funds for congressional sexual-harassment settlements; and a campaign-finance plank that offers matching federal funds for small-dollar donations and requires super PACs to publicly disclose their donors. At a press conference on Friday, Sarbanes said, “There’s a lot of people out there in the country who feel right now that Washington doesn’t listen to them, their democracy doesn’t work for them, they’re kind of left out and locked out.”
H.R. 1 will be the culmination of years of anxiety and anger among Democrats about the impact that voter suppression, gerrymandering, and post Citizens-United campaign finance have had on their electoral prospects and on American democracy as a whole. But its proposals are already a step behind those of progressive activists, which include granting statehood to Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. In an interview earlier this month, Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the group Indivisible, told me, “We should not be trying to accomplish twenty-first-century economic and social-policy gains with nineteenth- or eighteenth-century political institutions.” H.R. 1 will not satisfy such demands, but it makes clear that reforming our democracy now resides near the top of the Party’s agenda.
