President Donald Trump is pressuring lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act voter suppression bill by attaching it to housing and foreign intelligence surveillance legislation currently pending before Congress.
The SAVE America Act would take a giant leap towards the Trump administration’s goals of wresting control of elections away from states.
It would also potentially disenfranchise millions of voters through its provisions requiring documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, restrictive voter ID elements and – if Trump has his way – the elimination of mail-in ballot voting.
Trump seized on a recent situation in Maryland where new mail-in ballots are now being re-issued due to a vendor error that sent the wrong ballots to some voters ahead of the state’s primaries.
“Use the Housing and FISA Bills to get it done,” wrote Trump on Truth Social about passing the SAVE America Act. “Maryland just had 500,000 Fake Mail-In Ballots revealed. We cannot, as a Country, put up with this any longer!!! Voter I.D., and Proof of Citizenship, must be approved, NOW. Crooked Mail-In Voting must be stopped!!!”
The anti-voting bill is, for now, a dead letter as the Senate has been unable to pass it due to a lack of votes and, in some corners of the Senate Republican leadership, a lack of will.
Part of the FISA bill – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – was recently reauthorized for 45 days and will need to be passed by mid-June. Trump’s request to add the SAVE America Act to the FISA bill creates additional friction among lawmakers who are already in stark disagreement about it.
Congress is also close to passing the 21st Century Road to Housing Act for increasing housing affordability – a bipartisan bill that Trump recently threw his support behind.
But now asking to attach the SAVE America Act to it would almost certainly cause the legislation to lose support from Democrats, almost all of whom refuse to carry out Trump’s voter suppression agenda.
Millions of Americans do not have the limited variety of documents the SAVE America Act requires as proof of citizenship – such as a passport, original birth certificate, or naturalization papers – to register. The SAVE America Act also calls for a federal voter database that could lead to eligible voters being purged or left off the Trump administration’s list.
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