GOP Hardliners Threaten Government Shutdown Over Baseless Illegal Voter Bill

A group of hardline House conservatives and libertarian Republicans on Monday announced the price for keeping the government open until September 30: passage of an anti-illegal voting bill that most experts say is not necessary.

The day-to-day operations of the government — most federal agencies and the programs they provide, plus Social Security and Medicare — are funded through September 30. But keeping the government open after that date and after the Nov. 5 general election will require a temporary spending bill to be approved by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, a so-called continuing resolution.

“Furthermore, the Continuing Resolution must include the [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility] Act – as requested by President Trump – to prevent noncitizens from voting to preserve free and fair elections in light of the millions of illegal aliens imported by the Biden-Harris administration over the past four years,” said the House Freedom Caucus. in a social media post.

The bill ostensibly aims to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting in federal elections, something already illegal and, according to election experts, so extremely rare that it does not pose a problem.

But the bill appears to be a pet project of the Trump campaign, as a way to warn Democrats before the election about the number of undocumented immigrants who have crossed the border in recent years. The House already approved the bill in July, with five Democrats joining Republicans. Senate Democrats have shown no willingness to take the bill there.

Lawmakers are away from Washington until the second week of September for their traditional summer vacation. They are scheduled to return in a few weeks, when the main business will be finding a way to keep the government open so they can go out campaigning again in October and early November.

It is not uncommon for Republicans to try to take advantage of funding deadlines to pass other legislation, but no shutdown has occurred within weeks of a presidential election and it is unlikely that all House Republicans would agree to such a plan.

But that didn’t stop Freedom Caucus members from saying they supported the idea on Monday.

“Any short-term spending bill MUST include the SAVE Act,” posted Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) “It is imperative that we prevent illegals from voting in our elections before it is too late.”

“Let’s keep illegals from voting on November 5th and let the will of the American people be reflected in how the government is funded next year,” posted Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chairman of the group who recently lost his bid for re-election in his party’s primary.

The idea also received an endorsement from a pro-Trump Republican in the Senate, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who on the site formerly known as Twitter posted, “This is the way” during a repost of the Freedom Caucus statement.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) in an article for Fox Newsasked Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (DN.Y.) on Monday to introduce the bill in the Senate, but he stopped short of endorsing the idea of ​​making its passage a condition of keeping the government open.

Most elections Experts see non-citizen voting as a problem At the federal level, in line with the vision of Democrats in Congress, the bill is a solution in search of a problem.

In 2016, North Carolina found 41 legal immigrants who were not voted citizens, out of a total of 4.8 million votes cast. In 2022, Georgia said 1,634 noncitizens tried to register to vote, but they were all caught and none of them actually made it onto the voting rolls.

That didn’t stop the Trump campaign from saying that noncitizens voting it’s a problem and pressuring the House to vote on the SAVE Act. Johnson, at a press conference at the Capitol on the east steps of the House of Representatives and joined by former Trump administration official Stephen Miller, acknowledged in May that hard data was lacking.

“We all know intuitively that many illegals are voting in federal elections, but that is not something that is easily demonstrable,” Johnson said. “We don’t have that number.”