How an Anti-Corruption Bill Became a Showdown on Democracy

The filibuster of a sprawling bill on voter rights, corruption and campaign finance will cap its journey from a Democratic statement to a larger struggle over the nation’s direction.

WASHINGTON — When House Democrats sat down to write an expansive elections and presidential ethics bill in 2019, passage was the farthest thing from their minds. Democrats running for the House in Republican-leaning districts had campaigned on a poll-tested message of ending corruption in Donald J. Trump’s Washington, rooting out money from politics, and ending partisan gerrymandering, ideas that were popular across the political spectrum. Their newly elected speaker, Nancy Pelosi, wanted to enshrine those campaign pledges as the first bill of the new Democratic House, House Resolution 1 — a transformative measure, but with Republicans controlling the Senate and Mr. Trump in the White House, one that had no chance of becoming law. By this year, circumstances had changed dramatically — after the effort by Mr. Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election and amid a rush by Republicans to enact a wave of state-level legislation impeding ballot access — but the bill had not.