For the People Act of 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chairwoman, all too often in Washington, we mistake activity for progress, and in many cases we apply that misguided framework onto the States.
There are few better examples of this than Washington's dabbling in our election laws over the last 2 or 3 decades.
The National Voter Registration Act, our last big partisan bill, aimed at increasing turnout, did not actually achieve that aim. It increased voter registration, but as the Congressional Research Service has said:
Its effect on turnout remains unclear. Its cost and mandates on the States, however, were very clear.
That is exactly what I am talking about in terms of mistaking activity for progress.
The centerpiece of division A's voting section is automatic registration. According to my colleagues on the other side, it covers all sorts of problems: updating the voter rolls, lack of participation, et cetera.
No excuse vote by mail, same-day registration can be important, but is the automatic voter registration section that is hoped for the driver of participation?
This is an aggressive mandate in a bill full of aggressive mandates.
Fifteen States and Washington, D.C., have automatic registration. Only five States do it at every welfare and government agency. Three States require registrants to decline by postcard.
This bill would more or less include all three of these provisions.
This bill would also require the automatic preregistration of 16- year-olds.
If it went into law, it would amount to, at the very least, a top three most aggressive automatic registration program all across the country, but the bill says that if you are in a State where you have already got an automatic registration program on the books, you don't have to comply with all the mandates in the bill.
My amendment would do the same thing, but for outcomes instead of for registration.
The outcome that this bill looks for is turnout.
States that have seen massive increases in turnout should get rewarded, and that is what this amendment does. It lets States who have achieved increased turnout be rewarded by exemption from the mandates in this bill to continue the success that they have been able to achieve with their own programs.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chairwoman, the amendment that I have offered is in keeping with the spirit of the bill. States are balancing the right of everyone to have access to the polls.
Automatic voter registration has allowed so much access to the polls, that it has created challenges for States to be able to comply, even with people who are only supposed to vote legally. They have access to voter registration through Motor Voter and other ways when they are not even residents of the United States, and it puts burdens on States to comply with that.
This would be a one-size-fits-all mandate from the Federal Government that may be needed in some States where access has been challenging and where voter turnout has been low, but in States that have had high voter turnout, that do have effective regimes where you have not just access, but you have participation at levels that have increased by 5 percent or more, to continue on the path of success that they have had without disruption from Federal mandates that would potentially do that.
The Brennan Center says:
Automatic voter registration is gaining momentum across the country.
Currently, 15 States and D.C. have approved the policy, meaning that over a third of Americans live in a jurisdiction that has either passed or implemented automatic voter registration. This policy is winning at the State level and overall push for turnout is also winning.
My amendment is complementary to this bill's enterprise and it would do nothing to undermine the pushes that are already going on at the State level.
It was Madison who said that States are: . . . best acquainted with the situation of their people.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chairwoman, I want to quote from a speech delivered by a former SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, chair:
Certain mandates, which invoke the Securities and Exchange Commission's mandatory disclosure powers, seem more directed at exerting societal pressure on companies to change behavior, rather than to disclose financial information that primarily informs investment decisions.
That is not to say that the goals of such mandates are not laudable. Indeed, most are. Seeking to improve safety in mines for workers or to end horrible human rights atrocities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are compelling objectives, which, as a citizen, I wholeheartedly share.
But, as Chair of the SEC, I must question, as a policy matter, using the Federal securities laws and the SEC's powers of mandatory disclosure to accomplish these goals.
Those are the words of Mary Jo White, President Obama's SEC Chair. She understood what this body understood when it adopted the rider in the appropriations bill my amendment seeks to protect.
The SEC cannot and should not be used as a tool for social engineering. The disclosure laws cannot be used as a method to compel noneconomic behaviors. The SEC has known this since the 1970s, when it received hundreds of different petitions to add dozens of different disclosure requirements. It stated at the time, ``The Commission's experience over the years in proposing and framing disclosure requirements has not led it to question the basic decision of the Congress that, insofar as investing is concerned, the primary interest of investors is economic. After all, the principal if not the only reason, why people invest their money in securities is to obtain a return. A variety of other motives are probably present in the investment decisions of numerous investors; but the only common thread is the hope for a satisfactory return, and it is to this that a disclosure scheme intended to be useful to all must be primarily addressed.''
Madam Chair, we don't know what each individual investor wants, disclosure requirements have proven very costly, and I urge my colleagues to support the position of the Obama SEC Chair and the SEC since the 1970s, which my amendment seeks to preserve.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chairwoman, companies are already going ahead and disclosing political donations. 196 of the Fortune 500 companies have disclosure policies in place, up from 174 in 2015. More companies are deciding this is the right way to approach their political giving.
But I don't have anything to say against their voluntary decision. I do think it is a mistake to force compliance through disclosure laws at a time when public markets are less attractive than ever for going public.
Capital formation in the United States of America could easily be improved and has, in fact, suffered by a heavyhanded regulatory approach.
Corporations are not treated differently than individuals are. There is nothing that compels an individual to disclose every single dollar they donate and to whom. This would go in the other way.
If you decide to go public in the United States, you are treated differently under the law than a private company or a private individual. The reality is, under the law, you should be treated the same way. In some cases, you are allowed to give a donation privately, and in other cases, you are not. Corporations have to comply with that law. The Federal Election Commission administers that law, not the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chair, may I ask how much time I have remaining.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. I wonder, Madam Chairwoman, whether folks opposed to my amendment would be in favor of requiring every single person and corporation to disclose every dollar that they give. That is essentially what you are saying here: We want to treat publicly traded companies differently than we want to treat every other company and every other individual. And we realize that the FEC isn't competent or qualified to do that job, so we want to add another agency to do this.
President Obama's own Chair of the SEC stated: When disclosure gets too complicated or strays from its core purposes, it can lead to information overload, a phenomenon in which ever-increasing amounts of disclosure make it difficult for investors to focus on the information that is material and most relevant to the decisionmaking of investors in the financial markets.
As has been stated, the fiduciary responsibility of the directors of the company, of the shareholders, and of the people making investments is a common denominator. There may be disparate political views in these days--there surely are--and unpopular positions may be at odds with the fiduciary responsibilities of companies.
This should have been debated in a Financial Services Committee--one of the other flaws of this path that we are on today--subrogating all of the authority of the other committees with only a handful of the amount of participation.
Lastly, I would say that a majority of Democrats actually voted for the appropriations bill with the riders that are at the heart of the opposition's objection to my amendment.
Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chairwoman, my amendment would uphold an appropriations policy rider included in the FY 2019 appropriations package that this body, on a bipartisan basis, just voted on last month. That provision prevents the IRS from the collection of donor information for 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations.
In 2013, when the IRS attempted to issue rules that would clamp down on these organizations, there was bipartisan pushback from groups as disparate as the ACLU and Tea Party Patriots.
The IRS has a poor track record on the handling of donor information of these organizations. The 2013 IRS scandal of targeting conservative groups is the perfect example of this. The IRS asked groups excruciatingly detailed questions, even as far as for the details of the prayer meetings of pro-life organizations. Government agencies investigating the intimate details of an organization's efforts to participate in issue advocacy creates an unconstitutional chilling effect on free speech.
The IRS is a tax collection agency, not an arbiter of the fitness of an organization's political viewpoint. My amendment is about the fundamental First Amendment rights for citizens and groups to participate in public discourse.
Finally, H.R. 1's needless removal of a bipartisan policy rider does not make sense in the context of this bill's inclusion of the DISCLOSE Act. I oppose the First Amendment privacy issues raised by the DISCLOSE Act provisions, like the ACLU opposes the DISCLOSE Act, but duplicative collection of information, especially through a scandal-ridden agency like the IRS, which has scandalously overstepped its bounds and authority and jurisdiction, highlight what this amendment is all about. It is inappropriate for the IRS to collect this sort of information.
It is my hope that we can maintain the well-considered appropriations rider already included in the package passed just last month.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chair, may I inquire of the amount of time remaining.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chairwoman, even the scandal-ridden, 2013-era IRS that targeted conservative groups, overstepping its jurisdiction by trying to shape the speech and conduct of organizations rather than collect their taxes, withdrew the rulemaking process at the heart of what is sought in this H.R. 1 bill. It is a chilling effect.
As we talk about one of our rights, access to the ballot box at the Federal level, and we consider that, I think it is important to remember the founding principles that led to the creation of this country, and they are enshrined in the Federalist Papers.
I include in the Record a copy of Federalist Paper No. 59, wherein Madison makes the case that Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution is about the Federal Government's right to defend itself. It is not about Congress being the prime driver of elections. congress gets to regulate elections
Federalist No. 59:
It is absolute not the first province of the federal government. This is what Hamilton said in Federalist 59:
They have submitted the regulation of elections for the federal government, in the first instance, to the local administrations; which, in ordinary cases, and when no improper views prevail, may be both more convenient and more satisfactory; but they have reserved to the national authority a right to interpose, whenever extraordinary circumstances might render that interposition necessary to its safety.
Article 1 section 4 is about the federal government's right to defend itself. It is not about Congress being the prime driver of elections.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. As we look at this, we have the Federal Election Commission. We have bodies of law that require disclosure, and we have organizations that sometimes violate those disclosure laws, and those companies are prosecuted when they do that.
Here, we want to take and add the IRS responsibility of shaping that disclosure, and only for these types of groups and these types of donations. It is intended to have a chilling effect on the speech, and that is at the core of the objection for groups that don't agree on much.
Between the ACLU and the NRA they don't often agree, but they agree that H.R. 1 is bad, and this goes to the heart of their objection.
Madam Chair, I ask unanimous support for my amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chairwoman, in Alabama v. the NAACP, the courts upheld the right to protect the privacy of donor information.
The right to privacy is fundamental to our Bill of Rights, and it is threatened. It has a chilling effect, as has been enumerated from any number of groups. My colleagues know this.
Just recently, social welfare groups, as defined by 501(c)(4), engaged in social welfare to support infanticide, a bill that could not get a vote to cloture in the Senate.
It would require the IRS, instead of the body of jurisdiction, the Election Commission, to deal with donors.
The IRS should be narrowly focused on collecting tax revenue, not on elections law, and we have seen abuses of their already-limited jurisdiction.
This is the right thing to do. I encourage my colleagues to support this amendment, and I ask for everyone who can find a way to see through the distortion of information that is being presented here to support our Bill of Rights, protect the right to privacy, and vote for this amendment.
Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. DAVIDSON of Ohio. Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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