September 14, 2021
Until today, The For The People Act, passed by the House on March 3, 2021, as H.B. 1, was to be the ultimate voting reform bill and a cornerstone of the Biden Administration’s legislative agenda. It faced enormous obstacles to passage, however. The first obstacle was Democratic Senator Joe Manchin who opposed the bill. Joe Manchin also played a role in the second obstacle, the unbreakable filibuster that the GOP had promised to mount against H.B. 1. Without Joe Manchin’s vote to override the filibuster, a vote which he vowed not to give, the bill was destined to become one more major Democratic bill to die in the Senate under the hand of one of the greatest foes of democracy in American history, Senator Mitch McConnell.
That changed today when Senator Amy Klobuchar introduced a “compromise” voting rights bill authored by Joe Manchin: the “Freedom To Vote Act.” That bill will be discussed in the following post. The purpose of this post is to provide the full text of the apparently now soon to be forgotten For The People Act for comparison with the Freedom To Vote Act.
The full text can be viewed in your browser by clicking on the link below titled “HR 1 For The People Act (Full Text).” Other links allow the full text to be downloaded to your device and shared on Twitter and Facebook. For an in depth analysis of The For The People Act, there are few better resources than the “Annotated Guide to the For the People Act of 2021” prepared by the Brennan Center For Justice at the NYU Law School and posted on their website at this link: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/annotated-guide-people-act-2021