Where in H.R. 1 does it make election day a federal holiday?

March 22, 2019 1:41 PM

H.R. 1 passed in the US House of Representatives earlier this month, and this vox article says that it "Mak[es] Election Day a holiday for federal employees and encourag[es] private sector businesses to do the same." Where is the text in the bill that legislates this?
posted by homodachi to Law & Government (3 answers total)

I don't believe it's actually in H.R.1, rather it's being done in a standalone bill, H.R.294, the “Election Day Holiday Act of 2019”:

"A Bill to treat the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November in the same manner as any legal public holiday for purposes of Federal employment, and for other purposes."
posted by fso at 1:58 PM on March 22, 2019 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Okay, so the reason I ask is because I've gotten call-to-action txts saying that HR1 is "a historic democracy reform bill to make Election Day a holiday, end gerrymandering & get Big Money out of politics."

This CBS News article (from the day before the bill passed) also says "There is also an amendment to make Election Day a holiday for federal workers." I couldn't find that amendment but I've also never tried reading house bills before so I might be looking in the wrong place.

Was the txt I received incorrect? Or is H.R. 294 somehow bundled with H.R. 1?
posted by homodachi at 3:25 PM on March 22, 2019

This is ... an interesting observation. I actually researched every single amendment to HR1 on the day it passed, and none of them pertained to an Election Day holiday (I just double-checked my notes). However, I was unaware that the relevant language had apparently been removed from the bill. Gonna look into that further.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 10:15 AM on March 23, 2019