The MAGA House Admin Committee’s Worst Anti-Voter Antics

This week, the MAGA-led House Administration Panel brought their conspiracy-driven stunts to the great state of Georgia. In another hearing in its series on “election integrity,” the committee’s Republican majority enlisted a top voter fraud conspiracy theorist to defend their plan to take the state’s voter suppression laws nationwide via their newly introduced “American Confidence in Elections” (ACE) Act.

Their agenda is no surprise for a committee stacked with unapologetic election objectors.  While the Republican members on the committee have stopped short of claiming the 2020 election was stolen, four of the five committee Republicans in office on Jan. 6, 2021, voted to overturn the election results. 

But that’s not all House Administration Republicans have been up to since they took over in January. Here’s a timeline of some of their most outrageous guests and blunders of the past few months – including attempting to undermine the January 6th Commission’s findings and giving a platform to MAGA conspiracies:           

March 2023: Rep. Loudermilk tries to To “Clear His Name” 

One of the first things on the House Administration Committee’s agenda: clearing Rep. Barry Loudermilk of wrongdoing. 

After he allegedly gave a reconnaissance tour of the Capitol the day before the 2021 attack, the January 6th select committee took up an investigation into Loudermilk’s ties to the riot. The evidence wasn’t in his favor. They found that on January 5th, 2021, he allegedly led a group of up to 15 people through the Capitol, some of whom took photos of stairwells, security checkpoints, and entry points to the building.

With the House Administration Committee platform now at his disposal, Loudermilk used one of their first investigations to desperately defend his actions. Spinning the truth about the footage of his January 5th tour, his colleagues described the hearing as “an attempt at revisionism” and an overstatement of “the select committee’s view of his actions” – who never accused him of any wrongdoing in the first place. 

May 2023: MAGA House Admin Republicans argue for more voter suppression and less donor transparency

During its May “American Confidence in Elections” hearing, the House Administration Committee made their agenda crystal clear: protect their wealthy donors while keeping voters of color away from the polls. 

Blaming “woke culture” for making politics rough for ultra-conservative donors, the committee’s Republicans are trying to sneak in a few favors for their wealthy allies, including protections for tax-exempt organizations from donor disclosure requirements and removing statutory limits for aggregate individual contributions.

Meanwhile, their proposal to  “strengthen” voter identification laws in support of election integrity has a not-so-hidden agenda. The Brennan Center for Justice stated, “voter impersonation fraud is vanishingly rare,” and those without the requisite IDs listed by law to vote are “disproportionately people of color.” 

June 2023: Ken Cuccinelli, Chairman of the anti-voter Election Transparency Initiative, Testifies Before The House Administration Committee. 

When Ken Cuccinelli took the stand before the House Administration  Committee in a hearing about elections in the District of Columbia, he arrived with a history of peddling voter conspiracies. 

Just one example: in a June 2021 opinion piece, he argued the purpose of the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Act was “​not to protect voting rights” but to “stop voting reforms going on in the states that are making our elections more transparent, secure and accountable.”

Cuccinelli’s argument couldn’t be further from the truth. The Brennan Center for Justice stated, “the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the law to full strength” by “requiring states with histories of voter discrimination to receive approval from the Department Of Justice.” 

July 2023: The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky is House Admin’s star witness 

Best known for spreading right-wing election voter fraud conspiracy theories, Hans von Spakovsky also had a starring role in the House Administration  Committee’s latest hearing on the ACE Act. 

With a long history of pushing laws to limit access to voting in communities of color, he was the perfect voice to stand up for the MAGA-led committee’s efforts to bring Georgia’s draconian voter suppression laws nationwide. 

When von Spakovsky served at the Department of Justice during the Bush administration, he took “every opportunity … to make it difficult for voters — poor, minority and Democratic — to go to the polls.” As a result, more than half of the career lawyers in the voting section he oversaw left in protest. 

Today, Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s legal and judicial center and leads the Heritage Foundation’s election law division. Unsurprisingly, the organization’s sister group, Heritage Action For America, bragged to its donors about how it helped to write Georgia’s restrictive voter suppression law after Democrats won multiple key elections in 2020. 

—

These hearings are just the start of the House GOP’s efforts to weaponize voter fraud conspiracies as an excuse for more voter suppression laws that protect their political power. Follow us to keep up with the latest anti-voter antics of the MAGA majority’s House Administration Committee.