After a cycle that delivered them full power in Washington, Republicans are still pushing to change federal election law — and some Democrats are sounding a renewed alarm.
A proposal that aims to bar noncitizens from voting could disenfranchise millions of American women and serve a larger strategy, Rep. Delia Ramirez argued Tuesday.
“The SAVE act is not an election security bill,” said the Illinois Democrat at a House Administration Committee member day hearing. “It’s part of an authoritarian playbook, including the funding freeze and the persecution of diverse cities, and it takes courage and moral clarity to stand against it.”
The legislation — known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — was marked up by the committee last Congress and passed the House, before fizzling in the Senate. It would require American voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and Democrats have lambasted the bill’s limitations on acceptable forms of identification, which they say would make it difficult for married women who have changed their last names to register to vote.
But House Republicans have identified the proposal as a priority this Congress, making it one of 12 bills they teed up for faster consideration as they adopted their new rules package in January.
In Ramirez’s eyes, it amounts to an attempt “to suppress the votes of anyone who threatens an extremist, unconstitutional, authoritarian agenda,” she told the panel. “And that includes women.”
House Administration Chair Bryan Steil pushed back, describing it as “common sense” that voters should have to prove their citizenship.
“We’ve identified where noncitizens have gotten on the voter rolls, where in certain situations, noncitizens have voted,” the Wisconsin Republican said, though even conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have found relatively few examples.
He accused the “radical left” of wanting noncitizens to vote, citing Washington, D.C., where noncitizens can participate in local elections.
‘We can get a lot done’
Debates like this one could foreshadow another contentious Congress for the normally staid House Administration Committee as it grapples with election law.
Ramirez was one of several members who addressed the committee Tuesday on an array of issues under its jurisdiction.
Reps. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., and Chip Roy, R-Texas, called for support on their proposal to bar members from owning or trading individual stocks. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., called for a rejiggered Members’ Representational Allowance formula to allocate more resources to those with larger districts. And Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, R-Ga., said that as fentanyl overdoses remain high, House office buildings should be stocked with the opioid reversal drug naloxone.
But none of those topics sparked accusations of authoritarian or fraudulent impulses.
“Election integrity” was an oft-repeated phrase in House Administration hearings last Congress, during which Republicans unveiled a sprawling package of conservative election proposals dubbed the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act. The package advanced out of the committee but never got a vote on the House floor. Steil said he planned on reintroducing a version of the package this Congress.
Democrats have repeatedly questioned their Republican colleagues’ fixation on “election integrity,” casting the phrase as an extension of President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
But with Trump back in the White House and the GOP in control of both chambers, Steil sees an opening.
“I think with unified Republican control we can actually get a lot done … on election integrity,” he said in an interview last month. “I think the key here is to make sure we have what we’d like to do, and what we think is possible in the Senate with 60 votes.”
Steil believes with a Republican trifecta and shifting public opinion, some conservative election priorities might be popular enough that, if forced to go on record, enough Senate Democrats would vote yes to break a filibuster.
Public polling from Pew last year found that over 80 percent of respondents favored voter ID. And voters in several states backed ballot initiatives explicitly blocking noncitizens from participating in elections last November.
“Pause while I roll my eyes,” Rep. Joseph D. Morelle said, when asked about the SAVE Act last month. Morelle, D-N.Y., is the ranking member on the committee.
“I would never comment on the Senate, I find them more mystifying than I find us,” Morelle said. “But it would be hard for me to envision Democrats anywhere agreeing to the provisions in the SAVE Act. Talk about a solution in search of a problem.”
Despite their disagreement on the SAVE Act, committee Democrats and Republicans have been able to find some common ground.
A bill introduced by Steil last year that would prohibit political committees from accepting credit or debit card contributions without collecting a card verification value advanced out of the committee and sailed through the House floor.
Even on a controversial proposal like voter ID, Morelle sees room for compromise. But the devil is in the details.
“What [Republicans] want to do is restrict it to certain kinds of IDs,” Morelle said in February. “If you allow many different types of ID to be used, I think most people understandably don’t disagree because you have to use your ID for a whole host of things. I don’t think it’s onerous to do it.”
“Morelle has been a good partner working on a lot of these reforms. He and I disagree on some election law policy,” Steil said, before catching himself. “Not some. A lot. But that doesn’t mean that every single piece that we bring forward he says absolutely not. Because some of it — how do you say no to some of this stuff?”
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