FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Rachel Barnhart: PR Director
rbarnhart@represent.us / (413) 333-5656
President-elect Biden’s Day 1 Priorities Ignore Polarization, Corruption, and Gridlock
New administration fails to prioritize democracy reforms required to combat political extremism, improve elections, overhaul campaign finance
“Team Biden’s omission ensures that more extremists will be elected, more big-money special interests will dominate politics, and more polarization will divide us.”
“An omission of epic proportions.”
WASHINGTON (November 9, 2020) — Leading cross-partisan anti-corruption group RepresentUs is calling out a glaring omission of democracy reform from Biden-Harris Transition priorities. Fixing the broken political system must be prioritized first since it is the primary cause of political extremism, gridlock, and corruption that define U.S. politics in 2020.
“People are disgusted with the polarization, corruption, and gridlock in U.S. politics, but they don’t realize that they are all the byproduct of a broken political system in desperate need of repair,” said RepresentUs CEO Josh Silver. “We can fix the system through common-sense changes in law at the federal and state level. It just requires leadership that prioritizes these reforms. Based on President-elect Biden’s Day 1 agenda, it's not going to happen, and he is guaranteeing more dysfunction, more authoritarianism, and more instability. It is an omission of epic proportions.”
RepresentUs has long advocated for Congress to pass the American Anti-Corruption Act and several of the Act’s provisions were included in H.R. 1 that the group views as a positive first step. Highlights of the Act include:
- Stop political bribery: make it illegal for politicians to take money from lobbyists, ban lobbyist bundling, close the revolving door, and prevent politicians from fundraising during working hours.
- End secret money: immediately disclose political money online and stop donors from hiding behind secret-money groups.
- Fix our broken elections: end gerrymandering, let all voters participate in open primaries, let voters rank their top candidates, avoid “spoilers”, have automatic voter registration, offer both vote at home, or at the polls, institute reasonable term limits, and change how elections are funded.
- Enforce the rules: Crack down on super PACs, eliminate lobbyist loopholes, and strengthen anti-corruption enforcement.
“While GOP leaders rarely speak to these issues, the Biden Administration omission follows a pattern of Democratic presidential candidates talking big about these issues on the campaign trail and promptly ignoring them when the chips are down. That’s why our nation is in the perilous position we’re in now. Our unstable and divided political system is the result of a failure to fix election, campaign finance, and ethics laws, and to change the rules of the road for U.S. presidents including conflict of interest, legal pardons, nepotism, obstruction of justice, special prosecutors, foreign influence, and other areas.”
RepresentUs experts are available to discuss election security and democracy reform.
###
RepresentUs is the nation’s largest grassroots anti-corruption campaign, bringing together conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between to pass anti-corruption laws in cities and states to stop political bribery, end secret money, and fix our broken elections.