ATLANTA – When I tell people that I cover politics for a living, the response I almost always hear is that people want Congress, or the Legislature, or fill-in-the-blank-government-entity to “put politics aside and solve problems.”
“Why can’t they just do that?” people want to know.
For a perfect example of why it’s harder and harder to “just do that,” especially in Washington, look for a minute at the For the People Act that Democrats tried to move through the Senate.
The federal elections and campaign overhaul started life in 2019 as a 706-page message bill, meaning a best-case-scenario, in-a-perfect-world proposal. It wasn’t designed to pass, so much as to illustrate the values Democrats hold when it comes to campaigns and elections.
As usually happens, after an even larger proposal came forward in 2021, someone, in this case Sen. Joe Manchin, put forward a trimmed down concept that the Democrat said he could sell to his voters at home in West Virginia.