WASHINGTON — Some of the conservative leaders of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election gathered in front of the Capitol on Wednesday and called on Congress to pass an “election integrity” bill to prevent noncitizens from voting.
Leading the group, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., acknowledged that undocumented immigrants voting in elections is already illegal under federal law. “Some have noted that it is already a crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and that is true,” Johnson said.
But he argued that people “intuitively” know that non-citizens are voting, although he could not provide estimates of how many. Various studies to have showing that the vote of non-citizens is extremely rare in federal elections.
“I mean, the answer is there is no answer,” Johnson said. “That is the problem. … We all know, intuitively, that many illegals are voting in federal elections. But it is not something easily demonstrable. We don’t have that number. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that. This will prevent this from happening. And if anyone tries to do that, it will now be illegal in the states. We will have a mechanism to prove whether they are or not.”
A constitutional lawyer and close ally of Donald Trump, Johnson played a key role in pushing Trump to overturn the 2020 election. amicus brief, signed by more than 100 House Republicanssupporting a lawsuit in Texas that seeks to invalidate the 2020 election results in four swing states won by President Joe Biden.
Johnson was joined on Wednesday by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, two lawmakers whose text messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were emphasis in the committee’s Jan. 6 investigation into the attack.
Others on hand included a who’s who of MAGA conservatives. Among them were Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior White House adviser; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots who was outside the Capitol with a megaphone on January 6, 2021; and Cleta Mitchell, the conservative activist who was on the phone with Trump in January 2021, when he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,000 votes, enough to overturn the state’s election results.
Two other former Trump administration officials, Hogan Gidley and Ken Cuccinelli, also spoke Wednesday.
When asked at the press conference whether he accepts the results of the 2020 election, Johnson replied: “What we are talking about today is the 2024 election.”
But he continued: “Nobody can go back and reconsider what happened in 2020. We know there was vote harvesting, we know there were mail-in ballots. It was the Covid election. There were all kinds of irregularities caused by the pandemic, where states haphazardly drafted new laws and opened up systems and led to all kinds of confusion, chaos and concern that continues to this day.”
(“Ballot harvesting” refers to a third party, such as a family member, collecting voted ballots for return. Conservatives have criticized the practice, but the RNC is adopting it for the 2024 election “when it is legal.” )
Miller, who has earned a reputation in Washington as an anti-immigration hardliner, attempted to mislead the media and Democrats while standing on the same House steps where Trump supporters climbed over and overtook police officers on January 6, 2021.
“Democracy in America is under attack,” Miller said. He criticized the “open border and obstruction of any effort to verify the citizenship of those who vote in our elections.”
Despite the lack of evidence of noncitizen voting, Miller echoed unfounded conspiracy theories that Democrats are importing voters to help Biden win reelection.
Johnson first revealed the framework of the legislation last month alongside Trump during a visit to his Mar-a-Lago resort. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, would make it more difficult to register people to vote by requiring proof of citizenship. This could include presenting a U.S. passport, a photo ID showing the individual was born in the United States, or a birth certificate — documents that millions of Americans do not have access to, voting rights advocates say.
The speaker pushed back when NBC News pointed out that the legislation would not go anywhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate nor would it be signed into law by Biden.
“This is not a messaging bill. This is one of the most substantive… most important pieces of legislation that will be presented in our lifetime, in our careers in Congress. This is at the essence of what it means to have a constitutional republic. If people can’t trust… the integrity of this system, then we have nothing,” Johnson said.
“And then we’ll take it out of the House and send it to the Senate, and let Chuck Schumer decide whether or not he agrees with that sentiment,” Johnson said. for messaging purposes.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
