For The People Act is an attack on democracy

For The People Act is an attack on democracy (Can't post on r/politics)<br><br>This is the most important thing the Democrats could be working on right now. While a small minority think the chaotic situation in 2020 was somehow ideal, the average person sees what happened as a massive failure of democracy (and a lot of the extremes see it as an attack on democracy). While there are many blame games to play about how we got here, there is broad consensus that Biden and the Democrats won fair and square.<br><br> Democrats have a brief window to make sure this never happens again, while they control the White House and both houses of Congress. The "For The People Act" is their chance to do that.<br><br>The "For The People Act" is everything the Freedom To Vote Act is, plus campaign finance reform, the end of gerrymandering, making the Presidential Debate Commission bipartisan, and a new agency to investigate high-level government corruption. <br><br>Now, for all the good that these bills do, they don't actually address the root cause of the problem. The root cause is that people lie, people cheat, and people are willing to subvert democracy for a "greater good". But Democrats don't have the luxury of fixing human nature. All they can do is make it harder to cheat, make cheating more obvious, and make cheating less profitable.<br><br>The "For The People Act" goes a long way towards doing this. It forces states to make sure that everyone is registered to vote, and forces them to keep everybody registered to vote. On its own, this would save hundreds of thousands of votes at minimum, and maybe millions (there were chaotic stories about voter registration in 2020, with records of people calling their local election offices and being told they weren't registered to vote, only to show up on election day and find out that they are). It provides for 15 days of early voting nationwide, with early voting being a safeguard against voter suppression, and weekend early voting being a safeguard against both voter suppression and mail slowdowns. It forces states to expand vote by mail, forces the post office to provide free mail-in ballots, and makes it illegal for states to start processing votes until election day. This protects voters not only from slowdowns in the mail (this is the actual reason Texas had such a big line, not the weather), but also from a big slowdown at the post office right before the election (like in Wisconsin in 2020).<br><br>All of this is important enough that it's worth passing the "For The People Act" with no amendments. But Democrats weren't satisfied with just that. Instead, they decided to add on a number of additional provisions that are all very important in their own right. They decided to make Election Day a holiday, so that even more people can vote. This also serves as an additional guard against voter suppression and mail slowdowns, because voter suppression and slowdowns are both based on a small number of voting locations being flooded with voters at once. They decided to ban voter ID laws, which have been used to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of people. They decided to automatically restore voting rights to felons after they finish their sentences. They decided to stop states from removing inactive voters from the rolls. They decided to let 16 and 17-year-olds pre-register to vote. They decided to allow people to Register to vote online.<br><br>This all combines for a bill that will both protect democracy and increase turnout. In other words, it will be good for democracy and good for Democrats. In other words, Senate Republicans will do everything in their power to block it. And since the Democrats "only" have a 50+1 majority in the Senate, Republicans can block it with a filibuster.<br><br>The answer to this is simple. Get rid of the filibuster. But that's not all. If Republicans weren't filibustering the bill, it would never get 60 votes, since no Republican Senators have expressed support for it. So not only do Democrats need to get rid of the filibuster, they need to be willing to pass the bill along party lines.<br><br>This is a huge political risk. Democrats would catch a lot of flak for this from moderates and Republicans. But that's a small price to pay for the ability to ensure that democracy continues to function. Democrats need to grow some spine and take this risk.<br><br>Note: I posted this in r/politics first, but since that's such a shithole of leftists and communists, I'm reposting it here, a real place for political discussion