Author: Nicholas Fandos / Source: New York Times
An image of the Capitol was displayed in Statuary Hall on Thursday. Despite the government shutdown, Democrats are pushing ahead with their priorities. Sarah Silbiger/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — House Democrats will unveil on Friday the details of ambitious legislation devised to lower barriers to the ballot box, tighten ethics and lobbying restrictions, and require presidents and candidates for the nation’s highest offices to release their tax returns.
But the symbolism-soaked rollout of their top legislative priority was already at risk of being overshadowed before the day even began by the impasse over President Trump’s demand for $5 billion to fund a wall along the southwestern border. A White House meeting with congressional leaders on Friday could absorb the Democratic leaders’ time and the news media’s attention.
Democrats were expected to detail the bill — a patchwork of dozens of changes to ethics, campaign finance and voting laws known as the For the People Act — late Friday morning on Capitol Hill. Only a half-hour after the news conference, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her Senate counterpart and other congressional leaders are scheduled to meet with Mr. Trump to continue negotiations over the spending fight, which has shuttered a quarter of the government for almost three weeks.
White House officials and Republican lawmakers were optimistic that Democrats would be more inclined to compromise now that Ms. Pelosi has the speaker’s gavel in hand. But there were few signs that Ms. Pelosi — the Californian who was elected speaker with cries of “No Wall Pelosi” by fellow Democrats — would relent after the House passed two bills to reopen the government on Thursday night.
“Does anyone have any doubt about that?” Ms. Pelosi said shortly before that vote. “We’re not doing a wall. It’s an old way of thinking. It’s not cost effective.”
This is not how Democrats had imagined their first few days in power, but they planned to push ahead with their own priorities, anyway.
Party leaders view the voting and ethics measure as the opening salvo in a two-year campaign to either make law or drive a wedge between Mr. Trump and the voters who supported him over issues he promised to champion, such as infrastructure investment and lowering health care costs. As such, they were not overly concerned that the first bill was unlikely to even be considered by the Senate, where the majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, dismissed it as “probably” unconstitutional.
“What we are trying to do is make sure that the American public is at the table in Washington,” said Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, who oversaw the drafting of the legislation. “They have felt like they weren’t there. This is saying: ‘Pull up a chair. You’re at the table. Now let’s talk about all the things we need to go do.”
At almost 600 pages, the bill is a compendium of liberal proposals to marginalize the influence of money in politics, protect American elections from foreign threats, reduce political partisanship in the elections process and expand…
The post Democrats Lay Out Their Agenda as Shutdown Fight Casts Shadow appeared first on FeedBox.