Garnering bipartisan support in the Senate for the For the People Act — the prerequisite for Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's favorable vote — will be a nearly impossible task. And not just because the parties are predisposed to oppose one another's initiatives.
Since its inception, the sweeping election reform legislation commonly known as HR 1 has been clouded in partisanship, and seen by many GOP critics as a Democratic pipe dream. Here are three major conservative arguments against the bill.
HR 1 would federalize elections
While proponents of the bill say it would set minimum standards for voting and election administration, many conservatives are strongly against this so-called "federalization" of elections. They argue the rules for American elections should remain decentralized so state and local officials can follow the best practices for their jurisdictions.
In a March report on HR 1, R Street Institute experts Anthony Marcum and Jonathan Bydlak wrote that decentralized elections also offer a security advantage. "It is challenging to organize an attack that penetrates thousands of jurisdictions, which mostly operate on different systems or procedures," they wrote.
HR 1 would curtail the rights to free speech and association
The campaign finance portion of the bill includes provisions that would impose stronger and broader disclosure requirements on political advocacy nonprofits. Opponents say this would have a "chilling effect" on free speech because it would impinge on the privacy of major donors to political causes.
"The legislation will subject private citizens to intimidation and harassment for their private and political beliefs," a coalition of more than 130 conservatives wrote in a February letter to Congress.
Conservatives aren't the only ones with First Amendment concerns. The left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union also repeatedly criticized certain campaign finance provisions included in HR 1. The organization has sent letters to Congress in 2019 and this year ahead of key votes on the legislation.
In its most recent letter, the ACLU wrote: "We continue to have significant constitutional concerns with the bill, particularly the ways it would restrict nonprofit organizations' advocacy about issues of national importance, such as immigration, racist police violence, voting rights, and reproductive freedom when that advocacy merely mentions candidates for federal office."
HR 1 would weaken election security and integrity
Conservatives have raised the alarm over certain provisions in the legislation that they say would loosen voting rules and create incentives for fraud. For instance, HR 1 would permit voters to "designate any person" to return a completed and sealed absentee ballot to an official drop off location. Critics warn this could lead to so-called "ballot harvesting" in which partisan operatives could go door to door and solicit votes.
Another concern is that expansions like same-day voter registration would be difficult to implement and maintain in rural areas with unreliable internet access. "A person could show up at a poll, sign a registration form and cast a vote without any checks to ensure the person was actually eligible to vote," Henry Olsen, a conservative columnist for The Washington Post, wrote in March.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.