If House Democrats Ran the Country

I t’s kind of fun to pass a bunch of legislation without worrying about the consequences. That’s the situation the House finds itself in: Democrats control the chamber by a wide-enough margin to pass partisan bill after partisan bill, but approximately none of this legislation can make it through the Senate. There, given the 50–50 party split, ten Republicans need to support any bill that’s subject to a filibuster, and even “budget reconciliation” bills (such as the recent COVID-relief effort) need to pass muster with moderates such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema before Vice President Kamala Harris can break a tie.

The House’s recent output, then, is a glimpse into the Democrats’ id. It’s mostly posturing — but it shows where left-wing thought is at these days. And when these bills predictably languish in the other chamber, the Left will feign offense and demand the end of the filibuster.

Several of these bills are especially noteworthy, covering voting, policing, guns, and labor relations. One thing they share in common is that they’d override state laws — sometimes lots of state laws — in the areas they cover, replacing federalism with a left-wing nationwide policy.

The voting bill is H.R. 1, and the thing is truly massive. It would represent a complete, top-down overhaul of American elections, and the handful of legitimate issues it raises — such as Congress’s proper role in limiting gerrymandering — drown in a sea of left-wing fantasies.

Whether or not they wanted to, states would have to implement things like same-day registration, no-excuse absentee voting, 15 days of early voting, and ballot harvesting. They would be banned from checking voters’ IDs at the polls, and from barring felons from voting after they leave prison. States would need to have independent commissions to handle redistricting and would have to count non-voting immigrants in the population while drawing districts (a long-standard practice, but not one mandated by the Constitution).

That’s just scratching the surface. The bill takes countless voting issues that are normally fought out state-by-state, transfers them to the federal level, and resolves them in the Democratic direction.

On policing, there was some bipartisan energy for reform last year, as evidenced by Tim Scott’s modest but meaningful bill that Democrats rejected as insufficiently aggressive. This year, Democrats passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which has no such problem.

Minority-advocacy organizations would get a say over how police departments operate. In profiling lawsuits sanctioned by the bill, any demographic discrepancy in police stops would be treated as “prima facie” evidence of discrimination by the cops, meaning the burden of proof would shift to them to prove their motives were pure. The bill also reforms qualified immunity, a highly problematic judicial doctrine, but does so in an overly aggressive manner: In federal suits alleging constitutional-rights violations, police officers would be unable to defend themselves by arguing that they reasonably believed their conduct was legal; that they acted in good faith; or that, because courts had not yet settled the law in the area, they “could not reasonably have been expected to know whether [their] conduct was lawful.”

Like H.R. 1, this bill takes a big topic that is normally handled at lower levels of government, federalizes it, and imposes left-wing policy across the board.

On guns, there are actually two bills. One would require background checks on gun transfers between private individuals, with only limited exceptions to cover situations such as hunting, “imminent” threats of death or great bodily harm, and gifts among close family members. The other would allow the background-check system to delay a gun sale for up to 20 business days for what is supposed to be an instant check. (In some cases, beyond the initial database search, investigators need to track down additional information to figure out if someone is barred from gun ownership.) The current rule is three days — and authorities can already confiscate guns after that point if they later figure out that a gun buyer is prohibited.

Then there’s the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, an amendment to the ever-troublesome National Labor Relations Act. The NLRA currently allows states to pass “right-to-work” laws, which protect workers who don’t want to join a union from having to support the union financially anyway. Under the PRO Act, right-to-work would end, and workers everywhere could be roped into paying unions against their will. The bill would also make independent contractors — from freelance writers to Uber drivers — less independent, applying the NLRA’s provisions, including collective bargaining, to many of them.

Given the state of the Senate, I highly doubt any of this will become law. But it’s a frightening glimpse of where Democrats could take the country if they had a bigger majority.