We’re bringing you our weekly “Saturday Summary” a little earlier this week, as Saturday is Christmas day. Merry Christmas!

It’s been a rollercoaster ride, and truthfully, it was the conservative grassroots that kept our nation from going off the rails in 2021!

In January, things looked grim at the federal level—the Left controlled the House, Senate, and Presidency, and they began stacking the federal bureaucracy with radical Democrat operatives.

Across the country, Americans feel the effects of a nation governed by Leftist ideology––skyrocketing inflation, rising energy prices, unlawful mandates, critical race theory in our schools, relentless woke rhetoric from our leaders, and much more.

Fortunately, Americans have rejected the Biden agenda and conservatives have achieved some great wins at the state level while holding the line in Washington D.C.!

Let’s recap…

Election Integrity

It’s been a productive year securing our elections at the state level! And conservatives stopped Pelsoi, Schumer, and Biden from federalizing elections with TWO different bills they tried to pass in 2021.

Here’s what we did together:

• Passed common-sense election integrity laws in Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arizona, and many other states in order to make it easy to vote, and hard to cheat across the country. It was a truly grassroots effort to Save Our Elections.
  
• For example, in Georgia our Sentinels worked hand-in-hand with their elected officials in the state legislature to pass S.B. 202, which instituted many reforms like requiring voter ID for vote-by-mail ballots. With these new laws, Georgia ranks first in the nation on The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard. More work can always be done, and that’s why we’re doubling our efforts in 2022! Check out the scorecard here to see where your state ranks, and how your state can improve in the new year.
• Stopped the federal takeover of our elections.
  
• Democrats have tried time and time again to hand over election laws to woke bureaucrats in Washington. The Left wants to federalize elections so they can ban voter ID and mail every single person a ballot without verifying citizenship or residency. 
• Democrats have tried to pass two election takeover bills: “The Corrupt Politicians Act” (H.R. 1) and the “John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act” (H.R. 4). These bills do different things, but both grant the federal government enormous power and regulatory say over states’ election laws. 2021 was a victory because these bills were stopped! But we’re not resting—in 2022 Democrats will continue trying to gut the filibuster in order to pass these bills in the Senate. We must stop them!

We should be proud of what we have accomplished in making sure that it’s easy to vote, but hard to cheat across America. Still, conservatives should seize every opportunity for further improvement and refinement in 2022!

As the Election Integrity Scorecard will tell you, even the most secure state (Georgia) can still implement new policies that will further ensure the security of their elections. State legislatures in every state should seek to improve their election laws with these common-sense policy recommendations from The Heritage Foundation.

At the federal level, the Left will continue to try and federalize our elections. Fortunately, Senate Democrats currently don’t have the required 60 votes to overcome a Republican filibuster.

Still, as Democrats did with the debt ceiling fiasco, they may be able to convince moderate Senate Dems to carve out the filibuster specifically for election laws. All Americans should be asking their Senators to protect the filibuster.

Blocking Biden’s Nominees

One of the more harmful impacts of an ever expanding federal bureaucracy is the power given to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. People are policy, and having the wrong people leads to the wrong policies.

That’s why we are very proud of the grassroots for leading the charge this year by forcing Biden to pull two of his most radical nominees:

1. David Chipman for the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol. Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF)

• As Director of ATF, Chipman would have been responsible for enforcing all of the nation’s firearms-related laws. 
  
• Chipman spent the last nine years working to advance the agenda of far left gun-control groups. He testified that he wanted to entirely ban “assault weapons,” a definition so broad it covers nearly every modern rifle currently bought and sold in America. We had to stop his nomination, and so we did with your help!
  

2. Neera Tanden for the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

• As Director of OMB, Tanden would have been responsible for coordinating the President’s policy agenda across the entire executive branch and overseeing the production and enactment of the Biden Administrations’ yearly budget. 
  
• It’s a very important job, but Biden picked the wrong person to lead. Tanden’s background and policy positions raised serious doubts in our minds. She repeatedly has championed far-Left policy prescriptions like mass amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, dangerous cuts to defense spending, government-controlled health care, and dozens more radical proposals. If you also consider her vast history of incendiary comments towards conservatives, you can see why this is a win for the country.
  

Stopping “Build Back Broke”

As you may have heard, Senator Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) announced publicly on Sunday that he will reject Biden’s reckless and nearly $5 trillion “Build Back Broke” bill.

It’s the perfect Christmas victory, and grassroots conservatives can notch this as another win under the belt for 2021. Our activists in West Virginia deserve a major shoutout by helping to convince Sen. Manchin to kill this bill! They are the real heroes!

Sen. Manchin’s concerns about BBB are shared by many Americans:

• Inflation is at a 40-year high. Trillions of dollars more in government spending will only add to skyrocketing prices across our economy. 
  
• The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that BBB will add $3 trillion to the national debt when programs in this bill are scored accurately as permanent and not temporary. 
  
• New entitlement programs and handouts will fundamentally remake our society so that the federal government is in your life from cradle to grave.
  
• The government hasn’t even spent the trillions of dollars in Covid relief bills that Congress passed over the last two years.
  

While BBB is dead for now, we must remain vigilant. Sen. Manchin could choose to revisit this legislation months down the road, or work with Biden to pass a paired down version.

That’s why we’re going to keep up the pressure and continue to hold Congress accountable—it’s one of the things we do best!!

… And that’s a wrap! Just to let you know, this will be the last Saturday Summary of 2021 until the new year. We hope you have a very Merry Christmas and we hope you take some time to relax and regroup to prepare for the fights ahead in 2022.

We’ve had quite a year and look forward to our shared work together in the year ahead.

Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!

Jessica and the Heritage Action team

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