Congressional Reporters Are Failing Democracy (Again)

You know that the state of journalism is extremely poor when it is a pro-Trump propagandist from Fox News, and not one of the hundreds of supposed reporters covering Congress, who managed to ask the most pertinent question related to the GOP voter suppression bill known as the “SAVE America Act.”

“How big of an issue do you really think this is in terms of secure elections?” Maria Bartiromo asked Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) on Sunday. “For example, how many people do you estimate voted in 2020 and 2024 that were not legal?”

Those are great questions, and it is truly surprising that Bartiromo, who played a prominent role in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems that cost Fox News nearly $800 million, is the one asking them.

Perhaps she thought that Lee, a leading proponent of the legislation, would have an answer for them.

He did not.

“I don’t know those numbers,” said the man who wants Americans to believe that noncitizens voting is a major issue worthy of nuking the filibuster and grinding Senate business to a halt.

Perhaps realizing that his professed ignorance was not a good look, Lee then proceeded to do what Republicans always do when they are asked about Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen: He made stuff up.

“What I do believe is that there are at least tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands by the time all the research is done,” he added before shifting the goal post by suggesting that this was about voter registrations and not fraudulent votes cast.

Either way, he is wrong.

There is no evidence – zero, zilch, none – that “tens of thousands” of noncitizens have registered to vote.

Take Lee’s home state of Utah, where Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson is currently conducting a “Voter Citizenship Review.” According to her preliminary report, the probe has found ONE individual, out of two million, who appears to be a noncitizen who has registered but never voted.

A similar investigation in Georgia, also conducted by Republicans, showed that 20 out of 8,200,000 voter registrations belonged to noncitizens.

And it’s entirely possible that the lion’s share of this miniscule number of “fraudulent” registrations could be honest mistakes. All it would take is for a noncitizen — a category that includes millions of legal residents — or even the DMV employee processing their driver’s license application, to check the wrong box on a form.

In other words, most of these 21 out of 10 million people probably never intended to vote. That makes sense because doing so could get them fined, imprisoned, and deported — which makes voting illegally one of the world’s highest risk/lowest reward crimes.

And, contrary to what Lee claims, we actually do know how many people are foolish enough to commit that crime.

As we demonstrated last week, according to the Heritage Foundation (i.e., those immigrant-loving commies who gave us “Project 2025), who would really like that number to be gigantic to justify additional GOP voter suppression measures, an even 100 noncitizens voted illegally since 2000. And most of them got punished for it.

As Lee will certainly know, they even have a searchable database of all those cases.

Therefore, it seems clear that he was straight-up lying.

Certainly, a senator who believes this is the country’s most pressing issue should be able to express the scope of the problems (or at least have a better answer ready).

The fact that he did not also shows that the congressional press corps is failing. Republicans talk about little else than the “SAVE America Act” these days, and they should be asked all the time to quantify this problem.

Then, when they lie or fumble around as Lee did, they should be presented with the evidence that it is rarer for a noncitizen to vote than for someone to be struck twice by lightning.

And then they should be asked why this legislation, which risks disenfranchising millions of eligible voters, is the GOP’s top legislative priority when in fact it isn’t a problem at all.

However, that is not happening.

Perhaps congressional reporters are worried about their precious access to lawmakers that would be cut off if they ever dared to ask actual, hard-hitting questions.

To them we say: What is that access really worth if you are just being lied to by people like Lee? In that case, aren’t you just a cog in their misinformation machine?

By not asking the most obvious questions, these “journalists” are not just doing a disservice to their audiences, they are also doing a disservice to democracy.

They need to do better.