Sixty-Second Guide to ... H.R. 1

We were curious to know more about H.R. 1, a voting and ethics bill making waves in Congress. So we asked Catie Edmondson, who covers Capitol Hill for The Times, to break it down for us: The first major piece of legislation House Democrats unveiled in their new majority is an ambitious, 600-page bill that reads like an anthology of liberal anti-corruption proposals. Intended to show voters that they are following through on their campaign pledges, the bill, called H.R. 1, has three overarching goals: to dismantle barriers to the ballot box, end big money in politics, and impose stricter ethics rules on government officials. It also, unsurprisingly, takes a few jabs at the president. The bill is so sprawling that even the SparkNotes version put out by its lead sponsor, Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, is a whopping 22 pages, divided into sections including “Voting,” “Campaign Finance,” and “Ethics.” Here are a few of the highlights. H.R. 1 would: Automatically register citizens to vote, require states to allow voters to register on the day of a federal election, make Election Day a federal employment holiday, require presidents and candidates for the nation’s highest offices to release their tax returns, create a matching system for small donations to campaigns, and ban campaign contributions from corporations with significant foreign ownership. Opposing the bill has become a pet interest of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader. (He has dubbed it “the Democrat Politician Protection Act” and mused publicly that much of it is “probably” unconstitutional.) So it faces dim prospects in the Senate, making H.R. 1, as one of my colleagues put it, less a legislative vehicle than a political platform for the Democrats heading into 2020.