‘ECA reform is important,’ but ‘Omnibus spending bills are an embarrassing, trust-draining way to govern,’ says Nebraska senator Ben Sasse.
‘ECA reform is important,’ but ‘Omnibus spending bills are an embarrassing, trust-draining way to govern,’ says Nebraska senator Ben Sasse.
O n July 20, after months of internal debate and research, a bipartisan group of 16 senators introduced a bill to clarify the Electoral Count Act, the law that Donald Trump’s allies tried to exploit or override during Congress’s counting of Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021.
The Senate ECA-reform bill was passed out of the almost evenly divided committee on September 27 by a 14–1 vote. The lone “no” vote was Texas GOP senator Ted Cruz.
If the bill had received a standalone vote on the Senate floor, it would have passed with overwhelming bipartisan support — over the objections of former president Trump. But Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer never brought the bill up for a vote. Instead, Schumer punted the legislation to after the election and is now tucking the popular, bipartisan ECA-reform bill inside the contentious 4,155-page, $1.7-trillion omnibus spending bill that was released Tuesday morning at 1:30 a.m.
Nebraska GOP senator Ben Sasse, a member of the original bipartisan group of 16 senators who introduced the ECA-reform bill, is displeased with the process. “Two things are true at once: ECA reform is important, trust-building work to protect the peaceful transfer of power; and Omnibus spending bills are an embarrassing, trust-draining way to govern,” Sasse told National Review in a statement Tuesday evening. “Chuck Schumer should have brought ECA reform to the Senate floor sooner, but he was less interested in its substance than in using it as a sweetener in this crap sandwich.”
Sasse is not the first GOP advocate of ECA reform to criticize Schumer for taking an unserious approach to a serious piece of legislation.
In late September, Utah GOP senator Mitt Romney said: “Chuck Schumer is not bringing forth the Electoral Count Act. How in the world can you talk about democracy — the need to protect democracy — and not bring forth the Electoral Count Act?”
“I presume [Schumer] is looking for a messaging bill to show that Republicans are unwilling to protect our elections process,” Romney told National Review on September 20. “In fact, quite the opposite is true. We’re very anxious to put in place a reform of the Electoral Count Act, and [Schumer’s] delay has now led to a setting where the House is apparently proposing their own bill, which unfortunately will be a party-line vote in the House that makes it more difficult to actually do something on a bipartisan basis.”
In late September, the House introduced its own version of ECA reform, which had a few substantive differences with the Senate bill, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi skipped the committee process and rushed to hold a floor vote 48 hours after the legislative text of the House bill was released, ensuring the bill picked up as few GOP supporters as possible. A lightly amended version of the Senate ECA-reform bill is what’s included in the omnibus, which advanced on Tuesday night with the support of 21 GOP senators. But the decision to wait and slip ECA reform into the omnibus has masked just how much support there was for the bill in the Senate. GOP senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, for example, voted for the ECA-reform bill in committee, but came out swinging against the spending in the omnibus and the process behind it. ECA-reform cosponsors Sasse, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina also voted against the omnibus on Tuesday.
It’s not as though Schumer didn’t have time to hold a clean vote on an ECA-reform bill that wouldn’t have been tainted by the rushed process and legislative logrolling associated with any omnibus bill. It was simply a matter of priorities.