With the Midterm Elections only a few months away, the nation's attention is starting to focus on the Department of Justice (DOJ) and what role the DOJ might play in this election to help Democrats.  Just over a year ago, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced his intention to double the number of lawyers working in the Voting Section of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, which is charged with enforcing voting laws.  With a couple of well-publicized exceptions (e.g., Georgia, Texas, and Arizona), so far the DOJ has been relatively quiet.  Is this the calm before the storm?

On Thursday morning, the House passed Democrats' most radical piece of elections legislation yet, the "Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act,” along party lines. This legislation combines the "Freedom to Cheat Act" and H.R. 4 into one bill.

In 2021, Democrats made it their primary objective to pass legislation that would amount to a federal takeover of our election system. They literally made it their number one legislative priority and when that failed, they keep introducing tweaked but equally bad legislation.  But Republicans blocked these radical pieces of legislation again and again. As the liberal publication Vox wrote earlier this year, "Congress has repeatedly tried and failed to pass comprehensive voting rights reform this year, even though the Democratic Party holds the majority."

Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on the Voting Rights Act. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats pushed the same, tired talking points about voter discrimination that they always do.

While the public is rightly focused on the Biden administration's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, House Democrats chose again to focus on their own reelections. Today, it was a hearing on H.R. 4, the so-called John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The only problem: the bill contains no text for the committee members to even review:

The House Judiciary Com. meeting now about a bill that has no text & of which we have no idea what text it is going to contain. We agree John Lewis was a hero, but a bill in his name is not helpful to Voting Rights if it does not truly deal with Voting rights in 21st Century

— RNLA ⚖️ (@TheRepLawyer) August 16, 2021

.@Jim_Jordan points out this is last time to talk about legislation that we don't even have the bill on! It is outrageous that Democrats are having hearings and a VOTE on a bill that members of Congress have not seen!

— RNLA ⚖️ (@TheRepLawyer) August 16, 2021

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled, "The Need to Enhance the Voting Rights Act: Practice-Based Coverage." Practice-based coverage/preclearance is not currently part of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and would be implemented as part of H.R.4.

The Democrats are building a record to ram through their next radical proposal for the U.S. electoral system, H.R.4. They admitted as much themselves today during a hearing titled, "Voting In America: A National Perspective On The Right To Vote, Methods Of Election, Jurisdictional Boundaries, And Redistricting." Today's meeting was the latest in what will be a long series of House hearings on elections; when all is said and done, there will be 15 hearings in total.

After the Shelby County decision in 2012 by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the coverage formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, critics argued that discriminatory election policies would suddenly become rampant and voter participation would plummet. However, as Hans von Spakovsky explained in Newsweek earlier this month, their predictions were wrong.

The Supreme Court issued two opinions with direct implications for redistricting this morning, on the last day of the October 2018 Term.  In a consolidated opinion for Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek, the Court held that "partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts."  In Department of Commerce v. New York, the Court remanded the "census" case to the district court for further proceedings consistent with its rather confusing opinion that held both that it would be permissible for the the Department of Commerce to ask a question regarding citizenship on the census and that the Department did not provide an accurate reason for the question's inclusion.

Many residents in California are voting twice and it’s time for Secretary of State Alex Padilla to stop ignoring the problem. This flaw in their system has been an issue for years and the integrity of our elections is at stake.