COMMENTARY: Power over elections belongs to Nevada

Congress is considering a bill that would strip Nevada of one of its most basic powers: the power to govern its own affairs.

A monster 700-page bill called H.R.1 has already passed the House of Representatives. It takes away Nevada’s power to run its own elections and sends it to Washington, D.C. The bill would do so many bad things that there isn’t space to cover it all.

It would allow ballots to roll in 10 days after the election. It bans voter ID. It prohibits Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske from cleaning voter rolls from deadwood, a task she has gotten very good at recently.

H.R.1 takes the power away from the people’s representatives to draw legislative lines. It even mandates that criminals convicted of voter fraud get their right to vote back.

That’s just the beginning. It also pays political candidates running for Congress a salary with your tax dollars, as hard as it is to believe.

Not only is H.R.1 full of bad ideas, it fundamentally transforms the relationship between Nevada and the federal government.

The most fundamental power the states kept in the Constitution was the power to structure their own political systems. If the states did not keep this power 234 years ago under the new Constitution, there would not have ever been a United States. The politicians in Congress supporting H.R.1 want to undo that original constitutional agreement. They are the new nullifiers, trying to extinguish the original designs of our founding documents.

Power is best kept closest to the people, not in Washington, D.C. Our elections are decentralized and given to the states to run because decentralization helps preserve individual liberty. The Founders knew that when power is centralized, especially power over elections, bad things tend to happen.

Elections certainly have consequences. But there are limits to what Congress can do, even a Congress completely controlled by the Democratic Party.

America has gotten this far because our constitutional bargain kept power over elections with the states. Nobody in Washington, D.C., has the power to undo that bargain. If they try, it will be a destabilizing blow to our Constitution.

J. Christian Adams is the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney and current commissioner on the U.S. Commission for Civil Rights.