Trump Puts Voter Suppression at the Top of the GOP’s Agenda

Worried about the looming shellacking the GOP faces in the midterms (and the associated accountability for his administration), Donald Trump on Sunday declared that he would not sign any legislation into law until Congress passes the “SAVE America Act” — a bill that threatens to disenfranchise millions of eligible voters under the guise of addressing a problem that doesn’t exist.

That is why we are calling on Americans to ask themselves the following question: Why is the president’s top legislative priority a measure whose primary purpose is voter suppression?

The answer, of course, is that Republicans hope that the legislation will disproportionately affect Democratic voters and therefore give the GOP a fighting chance to somehow hold on to control of Congress in November.

It’s a decent bet. After all, the bill targets those who do not have ready access to documents proving their place of birth and/or citizenship, which is a greater problem among persons of color, as well as women who changed their names after getting married and therefore have a mismatch between their ID and birth certificates.

And, since both of these groups are more likely to support Democrats, Republicans hope the legislation will benefit them.

Of course, you can’t just call it the “DISENFRANCHISE Americans Act,” which is why GOP lawmakers came up with a ruse: They obfuscated the real purpose of the measure by claiming that it addresses the “problem” of noncitizens voting in elections.

It would be charitable to call their tactic disingenuous; in fact it is deceitful bordering on diabolic.

That’s because the number of noncitizens who register to vote is infinitesimally small, and the number of noncitizens who risk imprisonment and deportation by actually trying to cast a single ballot is smaller yet.

We frequently cite the example of the comprehensive audit of voter rolls that Georgia’s Republican secretary of state conducted recently. It found that 20 out of 8.2 million voter registrations belonged to noncitizens. And that doesn’t mean they voted; they could have been registered by accident.

In other words, the “problem” that Trump wants Congress to address above all other pressing matters facing the nation isn’t a problem at all.

And the GOP’s “remedy” to this nonexistent crisis would hassle tens of millions of Americans while preventing an untold number of them from participating in the election — all to weed out a few hundred noncitizens who may not even realize that they are registered and have no intention of participating in federal elections.

For good measure, Trump also added a prohibition of most types of mail-in voting and, for some bizarre reason, a ban on men participating in women’s sports and on “TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION FOR CHILDREN,” whatever that is.

What is that language doing in a voter suppression bill? We honestly don’t know, but the president wants it in there, so Republicans will just have to rewrite it and pass it again in the House.

What we do know, however, is that Trump has never pushed so hard for any other legislation. And neither have the Republican senators who want to sacrifice the filibuster for the opportunity to disenfranchise Americans who might vote them out of power this fall.

And, as Trump’s social media post, in which he said that passing the legislation “supersedes everything else,” has shown, the GOP is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to drag it across the finish line.

Primarily, that means a lot of lying about what the “SAVE America Act” would actually do, and there has been plenty of that from Republicans and White House officials.

For example, they frequently mischaracterize what kind of ID would be sufficient to vote. In the vast majority of cases, for example, a driver’s license would not meet the requirements of the bill because it does not contain the citizenship status of the holder.

In addition, they like to misrepresent the support of Americans for a voter ID requirement as support for the entire bill. That is false, however. Furthermore, they are lying about the level of even that support. Trump, for example, said that 88 percent of voters backed the bill, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt did him two better by falsely claiming that 90 percent of the country supports the legislation.

While Republicans don’t have the votes yet to overcome a “talking filibuster,” that doesn’t mean that they will stop trying.

After all, their jobs depend on passing the “SAVE America Act.” As for Trump, the stakes are even higher. A Democratic victory in the midterms will mean an almost certain impeachment and the kind of oversight the most lawless administration in history would like to avoid.