- Russian president says he expects Geneva meeting to be positive
- Donald Trump suspended from Facebook until 2023
- Christopher Wray compares hacking to post-9/11 challenge
A little more on those infrastructure negotiations. The White House sent out its own account of today’s call between Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Joe Biden. The key line here is that the White House said Capito and Republicans increased their counteroffer by about $50 billion.
NEWS: The White House sent out its own readout. It says Capito’s group upped their bid by about $50 billion. https://t.co/NdGrVLJhIj pic.twitter.com/gllv6PFi7a
The Guardian’s ace voting rights reporter, Sam Levine, flags this editorial from the New York Times editorial board arguing that Democrats shouldn’t go so big on a voting rights bill.
NYT editorial board not only argues that Democrats should pass a smaller, more feasible over HR1, but also that the details of HR1 are “poorly matched to the moment.” https://t.co/Io0yViy4kw
Because there is little chance the bill will pass in its current form, Democrats face a clear choice. They can wage what might be a symbolic (and likely doomed) fight for all the changes they would like. Or they can confront the acute crisis at hand by crafting a more focused bill, perhaps more palatable for more senators, that aims squarely at ensuring that Americans can cast votes and that those votes are counted.
A new election law in Georgia highlights the shortcomings of H.R. 1. The Georgia law, passed in March, imposes a host of restrictions on voter registration and on voting, most of which would be reversed by the federal legislation. It also changes the rules of vote counting in ways that are not addressed by the federal legislation. It facilitates third-party challenges to the legitimacy of votes and arrogates to the state legislature, the General Assembly, the power to appoint most members of the state board of elections, who in turn have the power to replace county boards of elections. The legislature removed Georgia’s secretary of state from the State Election Board after the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, refused to help Mr. Trump stake an illegitimate claim on the state’s electoral votes.
