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National Democracy Week
Jan 07 2021
Organizer: Declaration for American Democracy
January 2021 will mark the beginning of a new chapter for our democracy. Together, we can make transformational changes to our democracy by passing the For The People Act (H.R.1), which will get big money out of politics, break down barriers to voting, and hold public officials accountable. Democracy Week (Jan 11-15), a series of events and actions hosted by the Declaration for American Democracy, aiming to mobilize Americans around the importance of advancing our democracy in all aspects of our government.
Location: Virtual
Demetrius Freeman/Getty Images
President-elect Biden has previously supported broad reform initiatives, like HR 1.
Reform groups renew unanswered call for support from Biden
Jan 04 2021
Democracy reform advocates, still hoping for a significant statement of support from Joe Biden, have asked the president-elect to kick off the new year by pledging to prioritize their agenda.
One week after the election, 170 good-government and voting rights groups called on Biden to back their proposals. They believe that tackling corruption and strengthening democracy are of the utmost importance following the still-contentious presidential election. But Biden has yet to elevate that agenda.
While Biden cannot take any official action until Jan. 20, the 117th Congress convened Monday and can begin legislating right away So these groups are also hoping Speaker Nancy Pelosi keeps her word and once again focuses the first House bill on broad election, anti-corruption and voting rights reforms, like she did two years ago with legislation known as HR 1.
<p>Fifty democracy reform groups sent a <a href="https://declarationforamericandemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/12-23DFADBidenletter-1.pdf" target="_blank">letter</a> to the incoming administration before the new year, asking Biden and Harris to back their agenda and use the bully pulpit to boost public support for reform efforts. Both Biden and Harris have previously supported HR 1 and other reform initiatives, but Biden less than other Democratic presidential contenders.<br></p>
<p>Four issues top the groups' agenda: safeguarding voting rights by ensuring every person can cast a ballot safely and securely; ending the corrupting power of big money in politics by increasing transparency around <a href="http://thefulcrum.us/dark-money" target="_self">dark money</a> and strengthening election oversight; restoring ethics and accountability in Washington by reducing the power of lobbyists and fortifying conflict-of-interest rules; and protecting the rule of law by restoring the Constitutional system of checks and balances.</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>In November, Pelosi said in a <a href="https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-9df8-d665-a1ff-9ff8eb560000" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">letter</a> to Biden and Harris that reform proposals such as these would be her first priority in the House, and legislation would be introduced and passed on the first day of the new Congress.</p>
<p>In addition to supporting legislative proposals, the groups urge Biden to also use executive orders to encourage broader transparency around White House affairs and election spending. They also suggest Biden appoint someone on his staff to lead these democracy reform efforts.</p>
<p>"Too many Americans have lost faith that their elected officials can address our country's challenges," the groups wrote in the letter. "By supporting, championing and prioritizing bold reforms like HR 1 and implementing comprehensive ethics and transparency plans for your administration, we can restore ethics and accountability in government."</p>
<p><a href="http://thefulcrum.us/american-promise" target="_self">American Promise</a>, <a href="http://thefulcrum.us/common-cause" target="_self">Common Cause</a>, <a href="http://thefulcrum.us/end-citizens-united" target="_self">End Citizens United</a>/Let America Vote Action Fund, <a href="http://thefulcrum.us/maplight" target="_self">MapLight</a>, <a href="http://thefulcrum.us/representus" target="_self">RepresentUs</a> and 45 other civil society groups signed the letter.</p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p>
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President-elect Joe Biden, who with Jill Biden marked Veterans Day on Wednesday, has come under criticism for not making democracy reform a priority.
Anxious democracy reformers pressing Biden to make more of their causes
Nov 12 2020
Joe Biden has plenty of campaign promises to keep, beyond the obvious and enormous top priorities of corralling the coronavirus and stabilizing the economy. And that's made democracy reform groups, which have never counted him as an impassioned ally, newly skeptical their priorities will get addressed in his new administration.
Their anxiety has come to the surface this week. A coalition of 170 progressive good governance and voting rights organizations asked the president-elect to elevate a collection of fix-the-system proposals into his first 100 days' agenda. Separately, one of the most influential such groups, RepresentUs, lambasted the Biden transition for "an omission of epic proportions" by giving short shrift to the issues it cares about.
Their impatience, just days after Biden's victory became clear, underscores the precarious position the cause of fixing democracy's dysfunction has in the public policy agenda.
<p>At the same time, however, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has signaled she may revive the sweeping election process, government ethics and money-in politics legislation known as HR 1, and have the House pass it again in January even before Biden's inauguration. </p><p>Doing so "right off the bat," she told reporters before her Democratic majority was trimmed by about a dozen seats on Election Day, would "reduce the role of big, dark, special-interest money that prevents us from having policies that the American people need." </p><p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>That could only happen, though, if the Democrats win both runoffs in Georgia in January and take the narrowest possible control of the Senate. Otherwise, HR 1 and <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/biden-political-reform" target="_self">all the other legislation</a> on the good governance wish list — including a restoration of the <a href="http://thefulcrum.us/voting-rights-act" target="_self">Voting Rights Act</a> and a package to curb executive power abuses — would continue to get ignored to death by GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.</p><p>Biden has backed taxpayer funding of congressional and presidential campaigns — a Holy Grail for many reform groups — since he was a new Delaware senator in the 1970s. And early in his campaign for the Democratic nomination he unveiled a full slate of proposals for expanding voting rights, curbing money's sway over campaigns, bolstering government ethics and recalibrating the balance of power. </p><p>But, unlike seven of his rivals in the sprawling early field, in the summer of 2019 he <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/candidates-end-citizens-united-pledge" target="_self">declined to sign a pledge</a> to put those issues on top of his legislative agenda if elected. And, after he wrapped up the nomination, it appeared to take a concerted lobbying effort to get a robust section on democracy reform added to the party platform — just in time for a convention <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/joe-biden-agenda" target="_self">when almost all mentions </a>of the topic were about the need to assure easy voting in the pandemic-upended election.</p><p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>Part of that effort was <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/democracy-reform-groups-to-biden-dont-you-forget-about-us" target="_self">a public appeal to Biden</a> from a new coalition dubbing itself the <a href="https://declarationforamericandemocracy.org/" target="_blank">Declaration for American Democracy</a>.</p><p>It was that group that went public Tuesday with a <a href="https://declarationforamericandemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/9.28-Day-One-is-for-Democracy-1.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">manifesto</a> calling on Biden to both push hard for HR 1, whether Congress stays divided or not, but also make 30 different moves by executive order to promote voting rights and assure his administration is more honest, transparent, responsive and respectful of checks and balances than in the past.</p><p>The most important moves on the coalition's list, it said, would be requiring federal social services agencies to help the people they serve register to vote; tightening the ethics pledge for political appointees; curbing the revolving door between the executive branch and lobbyist and corporate offices; refusing to have anything to do with fundraising by so-called <a href="http://thefulcrum.us/super-pac" target="_self">super PACS</a>; posting White House visitor logs; and making public all the work of the White House office of legal counsel.</p><p>For the organizations in the group, any of these changes would represent a dramatic shift from the past four years. President Trump, who won partly on a vow to "drain the swamp," has done nothing of the kind while upending virtually avery norm of democracy he could get his hands on.</p><p>Most recently, and potentially most consequentially, has been his decision to contest his defeat last week and in the meantime refuse to cooperate in the transition. But along the way he has challenged the precepts of open and ethical government by commingling his business interests with government work, choosing secrecy over transparency at nearly every turn and thwarting all congressional efforts to oversee or investigate his activities. </p><p>But there is no time to wait, said Josh Silver, who runs the influential reform group RepresentUs. And the signals from the Biden transition team that such issues have fallen to the second tier demonstrate "an omission of epic proportions."</p><p>It "follows a pattern of Democratic presidential candidates talking big about these issues on the campaign trail and promptly ignoring them when the chips are down. That's why our nation is in the perilous position we're in now," he said in an exceptionally harsh statement Monday. "It just requires leadership that prioritizes these reforms. Based on President-elect Biden's Day 1 agenda, it's not going to happen, and he is guaranteeing more dysfunction, more authoritarianism and more instability." </p><p>Biden will likely focus first on proposals that could attract bipartisan support — starting with providing economic relief during the resurgent pandemic and then moving on to improving the nation's crumbling infrastructure and using the climate change crisis as the basis for job creation.</p><p>The political dynamic on Capitol Hill means Biden may have to pull back from some policy proposals that are mainly goals of the left and have little or no traction among conservatives. Democracy reform, in the main, falls in that bucket</p>
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Joe Biden unveiled a full slate of political reforms early in the campaign but has spent minimal time talking about these issues in recent months.
While you wait: What a Democratic sweep would mean for democracy reform
Nov 02 2020
American democracy has taken a beating over the last four years, but Election Day may set the table for historic reforms.
The severe stress test for democratic norms can be counted on to further intensify if President Trump gets re-elected. Continuation of a divided Congress would likely perpetuate gridlock on most policy fronts. But should Joe Biden win the White House, and the Senate turn Democratic as well, the new president would take office with an ambitious stack of ready-to-go democracy reform bills on his desk — all of them strongly backed by Democrats newly in control of the entire Capitol.
And those sweeping overhauls of the laws governing campaign financing, voting rights, gerrymandering, executive branch ethics, the courts and even the inner workings of Congress would all be both on the table and viable. The question would be how high they would be on a Biden priority list and how much political capital he and his congressional allies would be willing to spend to get them done.
<p>"As dispiriting as it can be how frustrated Americans have become with politics, their anger actually is a source of hope," says Rep. John Sarbanes, the Maryland Democrat who was the main sponsor of HR 1, the catchall election process, government ethics and money-in politics package that died in the GOP Senate right after the House passed in early 2019. "Because the fact that they're angry means they still care enough about their democracy to want to see it change and improve."</p>
<p><p style="text-align: center;" id="sufn"><a style="font-weight: bold;margin:40px auto;font-size:2rem" href="https://thefulcrum.us/st/newsletters">Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter </a></p></p><p>To Sarbanes, the voter protections and big money curbs long central to the democracy reform movement remain the most urgent, and the most likely to top Democrats' agenda in the new Congress. </p>
<p>But Trump's four-year assault on democratic norms and institutions has fueled bipartisan support for a new class of reforms aimed at ending self-dealing, cronyism, foreign collusion and other ethics abuses in the executive branch. Talk of expanding the Supreme Court and bestowing statehood on D.C. and perhaps Puerto Rico is mobilizing progressives. </p>
<p>And the Senate's legislative filibuster may also get toppled if Democrats take over and Republicans refuse to cooperate early on. That change would please those who view those supermajority rules as a relic of a Senate culture that's long gone, and as a recipe for the partisan deadlock that has fueled congressional dysfunction. It also would likely be needed to get most fix-the-system bills past GOP opposition and under a President Biden's pen.</p>
<p><div class="x12"><div class="htlad-Desktop_Content_Banner"></div></div></p><p>The obstacles to changing ethics and election laws remain as formidable as ever. Even reform-minded Democrats this year embraced deep-pocketed outside groups that helped push election spending past <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/cost-of-2020-election-14billion-update" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a record-shattering $14 billion</a>, double what was spent on presidential and congressional contests just four years ago. Bitter lawsuits over voting this year attest to the difficulty of expanding access to the ballot. And partisan divisions tend to flare most heatedly around the rules of the political game. </p>
<p>But the depth of the nation's democracy crisis may be precisely what ushers in change. Trump's norm shredding, the coronavirus pandemic, the resulting recession, heightened reckoning with systemic racism, income inequality fueled by tax cuts and bailouts for the super rich, efforts in many states to suppress the vote this fall — all have riled up the electorate this year, and not just on the left.</p>
<p>Voters are voicing growing unease that rigged rules are keeping an out-of-touch minority in power. Republicans' rush to install Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court was the latest evidence of this cited by Democrats, and it has boosted their fundraising and Senate hopes — along with their ambitions for reform.</p>
<p>"Our political system has so clearly failed the people that the environment will be ripe for a big transformative package to make our government work for all of us," Deirdre Schifeling, campaign director for the progressive coalition Democracy For All 2021, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/28/democracy-america-trump-biden-election" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">told</a><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/28/democracy-america-trump-biden-election" target="_blank"> The Guardian</a>.</p>
<p>Biden unveiled a full slate of political money, lobbying and ethics reforms early in the campaign and much of the consensus democracy reform agenda earned a place in the <a href="https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-07-31-Democratic-Party-Platform-For-Distribution.pdf" target="_blank">party platform</a>. But since <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/joe-biden-agenda" target="_self">ticking those boxes</a> he and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, have spent minimal time talking about these issues during the fall campaign — beyond professing their support for an election that gives Americans many options for voting and doesn't block them from the polls.Biden would face <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/democracy-reform-groups-to-biden-dont-you-forget-about-us" target="_self">considerable pressure</a> from good governance advocates to try to deliver in his first 100 days — and he could, if he decides he can do that while also potentially moving to combat the pandemic, stimulate the economy, address the health care system's shortcomings and curb climate change.<br></p>
<p>Those are big "ifs." But democracy advocates see an analogy to the Watergate era, which also ushered in historic reforms. If the stars align for Democrats, here's what their reform agenda would look like:</p>
<p><strong>Curb special interests. </strong>Democrats would immediately revive the "For the People Act," the other name for HR 1, the sweeping package of voting, ethics and campaign finance reforms the House passed entirely along party lines in March 2019. The bill would modernize voter registration, take aim at voter suppression and gerrymandering, strengthen ethics laws, expand lobbyist disclosure and inject new transparency, tougher limits and public money into campaign financing, among other measures.</p>
<p><strong>Restore voting rights. </strong>The afterglow of the election would spur a new push to update the <a data-linked-post="2636710625" href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting-rights-act" target="_blank">Voting Rights Act</a>. The bill the House <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting-rights-act-2641537798" target="_self">passed last year</a> has since been renamed after the late civil right icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis. The legislation would revive the racial discrimination protections enshrined in the original 1965 landmark law — by once again requiring states with histories of voter suppression to get federal permission to change any election rules. The old rules for this "<a data-linked-post="2636699867" href="https://thefulcrum.us/preclearance-voting-rights" target="_blank">preclearance</a>" were struck down seven years ago by the Supreme Court.</p>
<p><strong>End presidential abuses. </strong>In September the Democrats in charge of seven House committees unveiled the Protecting Our Democracy Act, <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/democracy-reform-237909823" target="_self">their plan for curbing</a> executive branch balance-of-power abuses after Trump is gone. The measure would regulate presidential pardons, enforce bans on foreign contributions and expedite enforcement of congressional subpoenas. It echoes some of the bipartisan reforms outlined by Bob Bauer, a White House counsel in the Obama administration, and Jack Goldsmith, who served in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/politics/trump-washington-reforms.html?referringSource=articleShare" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">in their new book</a> "After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency." </p>
<p><strong>Strengthen Congress.</strong> While the rest of Congress bickered, a bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress quietly but with <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/congress/select-committee-on-the-modernization-of-congress" target="_self">rare bipartisan unanimity</a> approved 97 ideas to make the House more efficient, transparent and responsive to voters. Key recommendations include technology and staffing upgrades, strengthening congressional committees and executive branch oversight and overhauling the budget process. Many of <a href="https://modernizecongress.house.gov/final-report" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">these ideas</a> would need to be turned into House rules or legislation next year.</p>
<p><strong>Limiting minority power. </strong>Curbing or downright ending the legislative filibuster, which allows 40 senators (almost always from the minority) to block a bill, would get intense scrutiny the first time the Senate GOP refuses to negotiate on a high-profile measure. Democrats may also decide that — in part to counterbalance the 22 Republican senators reliably elected from states with 5 percent of the population — it's time to make states out of much more Democratic and ethnically diverse D.C. and Puerto Rico. And they would frame talk of adding more seats to the Supreme Court, or limiting justices' terms, as a way to curb conservative dominance at a time the country is not so conservative.</p>
<p>And if Trump wins? Or if Republicans retain the Senate? Democracy reforms would be put off, but the impetus for them would continue to grow. History tells us that scandals tend to usher in cycles of change. As Sarbanes puts it: "It's when you reach these points of high frustration in the electorate, and a sense that things are fundamentally broken, that you have the opportunity to come in with significant reform."</p>
<p><em>Carney is a contributing writer.</em></p>
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