Three months ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson made an obligatory pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump’s ring and hold a joint press conference with the former president. It was not, however, a simple photo-op: The Republicans unveiled a proposal they appeared to be rather proud of.
The GOP duo pitched legislation that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. The absurdity of watching two notorious election deniers pretend to be deeply concerned with the integrity of elections was a detail the political world was apparently supposed to overlook.
Soon after, House Republicans followed through, introducing the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” (or “Save Act”), and as Politico reported, the measure cleared the lower chamber late Wednesday afternoon.
House lawmakers on Wednesday passed legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote on a nearly party-line 221-198 tally, despite the fact it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. … The Biden White House said in a statement of administration policy that it “strongly opposes” the legislation, though the Senate almost certainly won’t take it up.
Republican support for the bill was unanimous.
The vote was held the day after Trump published a ridiculous item to his social media platform, which read in part, “Republicans must pass the Save Act, or go home and cry yourself to sleep. Non citizen Illegal Migrants are getting the right to vote, being pushed by crooked Democrat Politicians who are not being stopped by an equally dishonest Justice Department. … The Justice Department is CORRUPT and won’t do a thing to help. They have no shame!”
None of this was true. Nevertheless, GOP officials and their allies pretended that their legislation was of great significance.
“This will be one of the most important votes that members of this chamber will ever take in their entire careers,” the House speaker declared on the floor ahead of the vote. It followed an online item from conspiratorial billionaire Elon Musk, who wrote, in reference to the Save Act, “Those who oppose this are traitors. All Caps: TRAITORS. What is the penalty for traitors again?”
All of this is deeply bizarre, it’s worth understanding why.
The principal problem with the legislation is that it’s a solution in search of a problem. To hear Republicans tell it, policymakers must prevent noncitizens from voting, which probably sounds reasonable. In fact, it’s so reasonable that the Save Act is redundant: There are literally zero locations in the United States where noncitizens can vote in federal and/or state elections.
GOP lawmakers have also argued that legislation is needed to curtail the scourge of noncitizens who are already voting. Except, Republicans have gone searching for evidence of this problem and found effectively nothing.
Johnson, while touting the Save Act in May, said Republicans “intuitively” know that “a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” which was a hilarious way for the House speaker to effectively say, “We have no evidence to bolster our beliefs.”
At this point, some on the right might argue that the Save Act is worthwhile anyway. Sure, noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, and yes, evidence of noncitizens casting ballots is nearly impossible to find, but maybe there’s no harm in simply passing the legislation anyway? Just to be safe?
Except, that’s wrong, too, because the legislation would add new and entirely unnecessary hurdles for Americans who want to participate in their own country’s elections — forcing them, for example, to produce documents such as a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. As House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries explained during the floor debate, “[T]his extreme MAGA Republican voter suppression bill is not designed to solve any problem on behalf of the American people. It is designed to jam people up and prevent Americans from voting.”
For good measure, let’s also not overlook the ugly motivation behind the GOP leaders’ push. Johnson recently argued that an influx of immigrants is “one of their designs” that Democratic officials created “because they want to turn these people into voters.”
That’s absurd for all sorts of reasons, including the years-long process in which some of these immigrants might be able to become citizens, but it served as a reminder that the Save Act is, as a Washington Post analysis summarized, “the ‘great replacement’ theory … in legislation form.”
