[National Review] At some level, you have to give House Democrats some credit for ambition. They may have just sent to the Senate the most comprehensively unconstitutional bill in modern American history. It’s called the "For the People Act," and it’s a legislative buffet of bad ideas.The alleged purpose of the bill, H.R. 1, is to "expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants." In reality, the bill represents an extraordinary federal power grab. At every turn, it grants federal regulators more power. Time and again, it renders federal election law more complex ‐ creating a chilling effect on political communication through sheer uncertainty and confusion.
The free-speech problems are so obvious that free-speech organizations on the left and right are united in opposition. Comprehensive analyses from the Institute for Free Speech and the American Civil Liberties Union are worth reading in their entirety and raise remarkably similar concerns.
At a time of extraordinary public harassment, boycotts, intimidating public shame campaigns, the act would expand financial-disclosure requirements, including in some circumstances requiring public disclosure of the names and addresses even of donors who did not know about or perhaps even support the political message of the organization they funded. Donors may give money, for example, to fund one aspect of an organization’s mission only to be involuntarily exposed as a "political donor" when the organization chooses ‐ without the donor’s knowledge or consent ‐ to mention a politician by name in a different context. As the ACLU points out, "it is unfair to hold donors responsible for every communication in which an organization engages."
Moreover, in the effort to further limit "coordination" between candidates and political action committees, the bill sets forth language so broad that, as the ACLU explains, it affects communications that "merely refer to a candidate or an opponent to a candidate 120 days before an election or 60 days before a primary or a caucus." The Institute for Free Speech’s Bradley Smith argues that, with such language, "the goal seems to be to limit discussion of candidates to the candidates and parties themselves, at the expense of the public at large."