AMAC Statement on The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act

AMAC – the Association of Mature American Citizens, comprised of 2.3 million American citizens 50 years of age and older, strongly opposes enactment of the recently introduced H.R. 4, the “John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.”

This is an inherently more atrocious and dangerous proposal than S.1, the fraudulently entitled “For the People Act.” This rendition of H.R. 4 also proffers a federal takeover of all elections in the United States – federal, state, local, and other special elections – but, in this instance, uses the “preclearance” processes of the Voting Rights Act amendments to federal civil rights law. 

This means the federal government would have control over all 50 states’ elections and the power to stop every state from adopting certain voting provisions, like voter ID and how voting rolls are maintained. Every state’s new voting provision could be overruled by the federal government once enough special interest groups sue them to trigger a “preclearance.” H.R. 4 opens the door wide for left-wing groups to target specific states for political reasons and sue them to manipulate their voting laws.

Under the Constitution, the states have primacy for establishing the procedures for, and conduct of, elections – not the federal government, and neither the Congress nor its Executive Branch administrators and staff.

This legislation violates that Constitutional premise and indeed limitation upon the federal government because it would hand over every election decision in the country to the apparently partisan left-wing attorneys in the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights Voting Rights section. The result would remove all election decisions from the states, which, under the Constitution, establish, implement, and oversee election systems in America.

In sum, this sequel to the original H.R. 4 is nothing other than, and indeed an insidious and more direct, attempt by its proponents to accomplish the federal takeover of elections objectives of S. 1 and its HR. 1 counterpart, this time shamelessly under the guise of civil rights.

Like S.1, the provisions of the so-called “John Lewis Voting Rights Act” should never become law.