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The House is once again advancing legislation to protect elections from foreign interference, approving the Safeguard Our Elections and Combat Unlawful Interference in Our Democracy Act (the SECURE Our Democracy Act, yes annoying acronym alert) by a voice vote in the Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday. The bill would "expose and deter unlawful and subversive foreign interference," and would require the State Department to provide to Congress a list of the foreign persons involved in interfering in U.S. elections prior to up to, and apparently including, the 2016 election. Any of those people in the U.S. would have their visa revoked and everyone on the list would be banned from entering the U.S. and from obtaining a visa. Republicans tried to amend it to apply it only to future elections, because of course they did. Committee Chairman Eliot Engel is a sponsor of the bill, which he says is necessary because the White House is not "taking the problem seriously," and "not enough has been done to punish those who stuck their noses in our elections in 2016. […] The response so far simply doesn't fit the crime, and every time the president is pressed on the issue, he shrugs it off.
Trump isn't the only one to shrug it off. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has stonewalled any consideration of election protection bills in the Senate. That's after a classified briefing from intelligence officials last week, which Republicans left saying they're "satisfied" that 2020 is going to be just fine. Democrats emerging from the briefing were less sanguine.
"Interference in our election is a very, very serious problem and it is obvious that we have to do a lot more at both the public sector and the private sector levels to combat it," Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said afterward. "I am very worried about what the Russians and others might do in 2020." Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner agreed that legislation is necessary, as well as "a White House that would finally acknowledge both the extent of what the Russians did in 2016 and publicly acknowledge that the ... conclusion of the intelligence community is that the Russians will be back."
McConnell, however, will continue to stonewall and even block efforts by Republicans to at least pretend like they’re doing something about it. Case in point, Sen. Marco Rubio who wants to pass legislation that would demand new sanctions against any country interfering in future elections. Not going to happen, says Senate Rules and Administration Committee Chairman Roy Blunt. McConnell has already made him pull one election protection bill from his committee the very day it was prepared to send the bill to the floor. Now he says that "further legislation focused on election security wouldn't be the right thing to do, and he doesn't expect more election legislation to move through his committee." What a shock, huh?
The threat to the 2020 election from Russia and other foreign adversaries is very real, and McConnell is actually inviting it.