Washington, DC – Today, U.S. Representative Young Kim (CA-39), who serves on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, released the following statement on Senate Democrats’ tying federal takeover of elections to a bipartisan bill to encourage U.S. space innovation.
Congresswoman Kim helped introduce the NASA Enhanced Use Leasing Extension Act (H.R. 5746), which passed the House on December 8, 2021 and would promote public-private partnerships to help the U.S. lead in space innovation. Senate Democrats could not pass their election takeover agenda on its own, so they added 700 pages from H.R. 1 and H.R. 4 as an amendment to the bill, which returned to the House for a vote. This amendment:
- Allows for public funds to be used for political campaigns;
- Makes the Federal Election Commission partisan;
- Nationalizes elections and undercuts voter ID laws across the country;
- Creates an unelected, unaccountable Elections Czar with the ability to change state voting laws and undermine the 10th amendment;
- Takes power away from local and state elections officials ensuring the security of our elections; and,
- Nationalizes California style ballot harvesting laws.
“The NASA Enhanced Use Leasing Extension Act was a noncontroversial bill to support the public and private sectors of our space industry. Senate Democrats and Speaker Pelosi hijacked a bipartisan, good-faith effort to support space innovation to move forward with their partisan agenda to take control of elections from state and local officials and give it to Washington politicians,” said Congresswoman Kim. “Speaker Pelosi is again undermining good government to ram through her partisan agenda in the dark of night. I came to Congress to fight for commonsense solutions that help the American people. I cannot support the Senate Amendment to H.R. 5746, that is nothing more than a partisan power grab, undermining our elections.”