Republicans on the Committee on House Administration held a hearing Thursday highlighting the importance of political speech and Americans’ confidence in U.S. elections.
“Our Founding Fathers enshrined the First Amendment in the Constitution. Unfortunately, in our highly politicized, political culture, and climate, the First Amendment has been under attack through the use of misinformation czars and cancel culture,” said Chair and Wisconsin GOP Rep. Bryan Steil. “As a result, many Americans have grown concerned that their voices will be suppressed or that their beliefs will be weaponized against them.”
As an example, Steil cited the IRS’s targeting of conservative organizations during the Obama administration. About 10 years ago, it was revealed the IRS intentionally delayed applications for “tax-exempt status from right-of-center organizations” leading up to the 2012 election. Numbering in the hundreds, these groups were “improperly subjected to baseless investigations, invasive and improper demands about their donors, and lengthy delays in processing routine paperwork.”
The Department of Justice ultimately settled with dozens of these groups over the scandal in 2017.
In order to uphold the First Amendment and boost voter confidence in elections, Steil said he is focused on introducing the American Confidence in Elections Act (ACE Act), which he claims is a “federalist approach” to increasing integrity and confidence in elections. According to Steil, the bill would “prohibit the IRS and any other federal agency from asking for an organization’s donor list, creating ad-hoc standards, and applying them to ideologically opposed groups.”
A version of this legislation was previously introduced during the
