Ted Cruz: HR1, the 'Corrupt Politicians Act,' Is the Most Dangerous Piece of Legislation Before Congress
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas believes that H.R. 1 — the “For the People Act” — should be called the “Corrupt Politicians Act,” and he’s right on the money.
The resolution takes the worst practices of the 2020 election and codifies them into law nationwide, with some added doozies that just make you shake your head at how brazen the Democrats can be.
Gallup reported last fall, before November’s elections, that only 59 percent of Americans expressed confidence that votes would be accurately cast and counted nationwide, matching a record low.
Nearly 53 percent identified fraudulent votes as a “major problem” in the then-upcoming 2020 election. The Gallup poll surveyed 1,023 adults over the age of 18 living in the United States and reported a margin of error of +/- 4 percentage points.
H.R. 1 would undoubtedly undermine confidence in elections even further.
It passed the House of Representatives earlier this month with almost unanimous Democratic support and no Republican voting for the bill, which now has advanced to the Senate for consideration.
“It is the single most dangerous piece of legislation before Congress. What I call H.R. 1 is the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act,'” Cruz told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday.
“H.R. 1 was the very first bill the Pelosi Democrats took up at the House. It’s the number one bill. It’s not about COVID, it’s not about vaccinations. It’s not about getting people back to work. It’s not about getting kids back to school,” he said.
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“It is about ensuring that Democrats remain in power and control for the next 100 years. It is a radical bill.”
Cruz then listed the many ways the federal legislation undermines election integrity.
“It strikes down every election reform protection at the state level. So photo ID laws — right now in a lot of states, you’ve got to use photo ID to vote — the ‘Corrupt Politicians Act’ strikes that down,” Cruz said.
“It sets up automatic voter registration [when applying for a driver’s license, for example], which would result in millions of illegal immigrants and criminals and felons being able to vote,” the senator added.
“The Democrats believe if illegal immigrants and felons are voting, that that benefits the Democrats and keeps them in power.”
H.R. 1 also mandates universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, “all designed to facilitate fraud,” Cruz argued.
“It is all about keeping Democrats in power,” he said. “I think it is a profound threat to our democracy and to our republic.”
Hans von Spakovsky, an election law expert with the Heritage Foundation and former member of the Federal Election Commission, shares Cruz’s concerns.
“If H.R. 1 is not stopped, then Americans may never be able to trust the fairness and credibility of future election outcomes,” he wrote for the foundation.
“Anyone who doubts that fraud occurs is living in a dreamland,” von Spakovsky contended.
“When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s new voter ID law in 2008, it noted that America has a long history of election fraud documented by journalists and historians — and that fraudulent voting could make the difference in a close election. After all, we frequently have close elections.”
Von Spakovsky elaborated on H.R. 1’s problems on the “Heritage Explains” podcast in February, saying, “Well, look, there’s a reason the framers of the Constitution gave the authority to the states to run elections.
“And the reason for that was they didn’t want the people who are in control in Washington, say one political party, which is apparently the case right now, changing the rules nationally to ensure that they remain in office,” he continued.
“By breaking the power up as to how elections are conducted among the 50 states, they were trying to prevent that from happening. And it means, with the national government running elections, that they can put in bad rules, such as one of the provisions in the bill that outlaws all state voter ID laws.”
In a letter to Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer earlier this month, along with Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, 20 state attorneys general pointed out, “Under both the Elections Clause of Article I of the Constitution and the Electors Clause of Article II, States have principal — and with presidential elections, exclusive — responsibility to safeguard the manner of holding elections.”
“[H.R. 1] would invert that constitutional structure, commandeer state resources, confuse and muddle elections procedures, and erode faith in our elections and systems of governance,” the attorneys general said.
They highlighted the issue of state voter ID laws in particular.
“Perhaps most egregious is the Act’s limitations on voter ID laws. Fairly considered, requiring government-issued photo identification at the polls represents nothing more than a best practice for election administration,” the letter’s authors said, noting that 35 states require “some form of documentary personal identification at the polls.”
“Government-issued photo identification has been the global standard for documentary identification for decades.”
The law enforcement officials also expressed concern about H.R. 1 preventing the cleaning up of voter rolls.
If it passed, “States could not use a combination of voter inactivity and unresponsiveness to maintain voter lists but may instead remove illegitimate voter registrations only where officials obtain some other unspecified ‘objective and reliable evidence that the registrant is ineligible to vote.’”
“This attack on reliable methods that states have been using to maintain voters lists without specifying any reasonable permissible alternatives belies any actual interest in preventing voter fraud. The objective, rather, seems to be to prevent meaningful voter list maintenance altogether,” the attorneys general contended.
Cruz told Fox News the key to Democrats passing other “dangerous” pieces of legislation, in addition to H.R. 1, would be ending the filibuster.
“If Democrats succeed in ending the filibuster, they will ram through the most dangerous, radical agenda this country has ever seen,” he said.
If Democrats end the filibuster, Cruz argued they will enact amnesty for illegal aliens, create a national gun registry and begin confiscation, establish the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as states and pack the U.S. Supreme Court, taking it from nine justices to 13.
It clearly seems never in recent history has the future of American liberty hung more in the balance than it does now.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
