House Republicans Can’t SAVE Themselves With Voter Suppression | Opinion

On the precipice of what looks to be an achingly close election, House Republicans, in their infinite wisdom, are planning to once again engage in their favorite parlor game of terrorist-and-hostage with the federal budget. This time their ransom note is a voter suppression bill that they have oh-so-cleverly dubbed the SAVE (Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility) Act, which would impose onerous burdens on voters to prove their citizenship. If Democrats don’t pony up by signing on to this transparently ridiculous ploy to reduce turnout, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says they will shut down the government.

In other words, Republicans have seen a big, beautiful rake—a red-hatted rake that they have stepped on many, many times to very painful political effect—and the only real question is whether they will go ahead and plant a foot on it, same as always. The guess here is that, in the end, this will all turn out to be empty bluster because most Republican leaders not only don’t believe their own hallucinatory rhetoric about vote fraud, but more importantly because they know that shutting down the government weeks before a presidential election would be a spectacular act of political suicide.

First, the bill. The SAVE Act purports to solve a problem that does not exist at any meaningful scale—non-citizens voting in U.S. elections. Voting by non-citizens is extremely rare and already carries sanctions that are severe enough to deter any rational person from trying it. After all, given the infinitesimal likelihood of a single vote swinging an election at any level of government, vote fraud is one of the most absurd and pointless crimes anyone can commit to begin with.

But as Michael Waldman’s Brennan Center For Justice analysis pithily notes, belief in this kind of conspiracy is now “the glue that’s holding together disparate wings of the Republican Party.” Republican politicians like Mike Johnson feel compelled to try to solve made-up problems like large-scale vote fraud instead of very real problems like children getting gunned down in public schools. That’s because their illustrious 78-year-old party leader was incapable of publicly admitting that he lost the 2020 election until this week, when he unceremoniously acknowledged his defeat. Nevertheless, Trump wants a bill to stop non-citizens from voting. Remember when he insisted that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 without millions of ‘illegals’ voting? And Republican leaders have to at least pretend to try doing what he wants, unless they want to end up like former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and dozens of other Republicans whose careers were suddenly ended by their public defiance of Trump.

What the SAVE Act would actually accomplish is to make it harder for young people and those in marginalized communities to vote. More than 21 million eligible voters likely lack the documents they would need to prove their U.S. citizenship under the act. The impossibility of this bureaucratic task is similar to why air travelers have been getting warned that they will soon need to have a “Real ID” to fly, only to see that deadline get pushed back again and again well beyond the point of total absurdity. It is simply not possible to require complex documentation at this scale without creating bottlenecks that will leave millions of travelers (or voters) waiting indefinitely at the gate.

The deep irony of all of these GOP voter suppression shenanigans is that recent analyses suggest that people who don’t vote might actually lean Republican. Any legislation that reduces aggregate turnout therefore might make it less likely for the GOP to win, at least in presidential election years. But because Republicans remain laser focused on suppressing Black and youth turnout, and because they think that making it harder for everyone to vote accomplishes that goal without any negative externalities for themselves, they keep at it.

The reason we should think of this behavior as rake-stepping is that voters have sided with Democrats over these shutdowns every single time. When Republican hardliners shuttered the government in October 2013, for example, Democrats briefly took a six-point lead in generic ballot polling for the 2014 midterms before Republicans came to their senses and eventually won going away. The public also blamed Republicans more for the January 2018 shutdown, and the pointless 35-day standoff in December 2018-January 2019. This is why outlandish and brave threats from Republican hardliners usually turn into meek capitulations and continuing budget resolutions from the party’s leadership.

Republicans have never tried shutting the government down this close to a critical national election, and it is highly unlikely that they will do so now. The public will blame the party that is seen as precipitating the crisis with unreasonable demands, and that is ever and always the Republican Party. If Republicans want to enact their dumb bill into law, they need to win a trifecta in November and then govern the country. And even Mike Johnson knows that is much less likely if his party closes the government in the election’s home stretch.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.