Opinion: House Republicans’ Repression of Voters Cannot Save Themselves
United States: House Republicans, in their great genius, are poised to play their favorite game of terrorist and hostage with the federal budget just before what seems to be a very close election. This time, the measure they’ve so brilliantly named the SAVE (Safeguarding American Voting Eligibility) Act is a voting suppression initiative that would place heavy requirements on voters to demonstrate their citizenship. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) threatens to shut down the government if Democrats don’t join him in this blatantly absurd attempt to lower turnout.
Put another way, Republicans have seen a large, attractive rake—a red-hatted rake that they have repeatedly trodden on, with very unpleasant electoral consequences—and the only real issue is whether they will, as usual, go to tread on it. It’s likely that all of this will be empty rhetoric in the end because most Republican leaders are aware that shutting down the government just weeks before a presidential election would be a spectacular act of political suicide, in addition to the fact that they don’t believe their own delusional rhetoric about vote fraud.
The bill comes first. The SAVE Act aims to address the issue of non-citizens casting ballots in US elections—a problem that does not really exist on any significant scale. It is quite uncommon for non-citizens to vote, and when they do, the penalties are harsh enough to discourage any reasonable person from doing it. Voter fraud is, after all, one of the most ridiculous and senseless crimes someone can do in the first place, considering the minuscule chance that a single vote can sway an election at any level of government.
However, as the insightful study by Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice points out, the Republican Party’s different sections are now held together by conspiracy theories of this sort. Republican lawmakers such as Mike Johnson are driven to address fictitious issues like widespread vote tampering rather than genuine concerns like school shootings involving children.
That is because, until last week, when he abruptly conceded defeat, their esteemed 78-year-old party leader was unable to openly accept that he had lost the 2020 election. Trump, however, is seeking legislation to exclude non-citizens from casting ballots. Do you recall his assertion that he would have won the 2016 popular vote even if millions of “illegals” had not cast ballots? And if Republican leaders don’t want to become like former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake and hundreds of other Republicans whose careers were abruptly terminated by openly opposing Trump, they need to at least seem to attempt doing what he wants.
In reality, the SAVE Act would make voting more difficult for minorities and others of underprivileged groups. It’s possible that over 21 million eligible voters do not have the necessary paperwork to demonstrate their U.S. citizenship as required under the statute. The complexity of this bureaucratic chore is comparable to the reason why, despite repeated warnings that they would soon need a “real ID” in order to board an aircraft, the deadline is continually extended to the point of utter ridiculousness. This kind of complicated paperwork just cannot be required without causing backlogs that would keep millions of voters (or tourists) waiting forever at the gate.
The profound irony of all these Republican efforts to suppress the vote is that new research indicates that those who abstain from voting may actually lean Republican. Therefore, any measure that lowers overall turnout may lessen the likelihood of a GOP victory, at least in years when there is a presidential election. However, Republicans continue to be fixated on reducing the number of black and young voters, and they believe that making voting more difficult for everyone achieves this objective without having any detrimental effects on them.
