U.S. House Passes Bill To Terminate Voter Suppression Federal Oversight Committee, Tax Funded Presidential Campaigns, Rep. Fudge, Obama Against Bill
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WASHINGTON, DC-- The Republican controlled U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to pass H.R. 3463 and terminate the Election Assistance Commission that serves as a federal oversight committee that monitors voter suppression practices in the nation's states, a bill that passed amid opposition from most Democrats of the House including Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11) of Warrenville Hts., Oh., whose congressional district includes the eastside of Cleveland and its eastern suburbs of Cuyahoga County.
Minutes before its passage, Fudge spoke on the House floor against the bill that passed 239-178, calling it a scheme to disenfranchise minority voters, the elderly, the middle class, and the poor, among others.
"There's no doubt that a concerted voter suppression effort is underway in this nation," said Fudge. "Abolishing the Election Assistance Commission, an agency charged with ensuring that the vote of every American counts, is just another step in the voter suppression effort and would completely remove oversight of the most important process in our democracy."
Created under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 as an agency independent of Congress to accredit voting systems test laboratories and certify equipment, and to administer money to the states and adopt voter system guidelines, the mission of EAC, she said, is to ensure that every eligible vote is counted.
"Does it make sense to remove oversight at a time when Republican-led state legislatures across this nation are passing laws to obstruct voting?" Fudge asked. "No, it absolutely does not."
In the first three quarters of 2011 19 new state laws and two executive actions were enacted to limit the ability of American citizens to vote. That makes it significantly harder for millions of eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012, Democrats argue.
Republican House members that supported the bill say that eliminating the voter oversight commission and transferring some of its functions to the Federal Elections Committee, and stopping the taxpayer financing of election campaigns, also a provision of the bill, reduces federal spending and the deficit.
Democrats, for the most part, disagree, at least in the Republican dominated House, though as the bill now heads to the Democrat controlled senate political experts and insiders say that it is expected to pass there too.
Funded by taxpayers that give in the area of $3 dollars from the government section of their federal tax returns and in existence since the 1970s with a coffer of $200 million at this time last year, presidential candidates have to be popular enough to qualify for the money.
Though the Obama administration opposed the bill, President Obama had refused the campaign monies collected by the federal government when he ran for president in 2008, and he was the first and only qualifying presidential candidate to do so since the inception of the monies. And in spite of rejecting the funds, Obama went on to raise some $750 million and defeated Republican Nominee Arizona Senator John McCain in a landslide victory, who raised only half as much, though he took the tax campaign money.
But in June of this year the president said that he now supports the taxpayer assistance of presidential candidates popular to American voters that was started by the Bush administration when he was elected in 2002, and utilized by Bush when he won a second term in 2005.
Fudge argued before her congressional colleagues yesterday that many of the bills that are changing voting laws in states throughout the nation, including one signed into law in Ohio dubbed House Bill 194 that state Democrats vow to appeal at the ballot box next year, include the most drastic voting restrictions since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, including unreasonably strict identification to vote.
Seniors will be denied their right to the franchise, and the disabled will find it more difficult to vote, Fudge explained. And she says that minorities and students will face more challenges than ever before. Soldiers, she says, that are honorably serving our country, will be left with their absentee votes uncounted.
"And let's not forget the people who died for our right to vote," she said. "People were slain to create the rights we enjoy today. This determined effort is really about targeting a specific population of eligible voters to change the outcome of the 2012 election."
Fudge said that, plain and simple, H.R. 3463 is yet another voter suppression tactic and that she supports the need to keep the EAC for at least another year to guarantee the right of every American citizen to cast a vote in the 2012 presidential election.
Reach Kathy Wray Coleman by email at kathy@kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, by telephone at 216-932-3114, and by comments from you on this blog that would not be posted and are screened initially.
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