A group of hardline conservative and libertarian House Republicans on Monday cited passing an anti-voter fraud bill that most experts say is unnecessary as the price of keeping the government in power after Sept. 30.
The day-to-day operations of the government — most federal agencies and the programs they provide, except for Social Security and Medicare — are funded through Sept. 30. But to keep the government running after that date and beyond the Nov. 5 general election, a stopgap spending bill would need to be passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden — a so-called continuing resolution.
“Furthermore, the continuing resolution should include the following: (Protecting American Voter Eligibility) Act The House Freedom Caucus said it would ban non-citizens from voting in order to maintain free and fair elections, as requested by President Trump, given the millions of illegal immigrants the Biden-Harris administration has imported over the past four years. In a social media post.
The bill is ostensibly aimed at preventing illegal immigrants from voting in federal elections, which is already illegal and election experts say is so rare it shouldn’t be a problem.
But the bill appears to be a pet project of the Trump campaign, a way to corner Democrats ahead of the election over the number of illegal immigrants who have crossed the border in recent years. The House already passed the bill in July, with five Democrats joining Republicans. Senate Democrats have not indicated they intend to bring the bill to the upper chamber.
Lawmakers are out of Washington until the second week of September for their traditional summer recess. They’re due to return in a few weeks, when their main task will be figuring out how to keep the government running so they can campaign again in October and early November.
While it is not unusual for Republicans to try to use a budget deadline to pass other legislation, no government shutdown has ever occurred within weeks of a presidential election, and all House Republicans are unlikely to support such a plan.
But members of the Freedom Caucus said Monday they support the idea.
“Any short-term spending bill must include the SAVE Act.” Posts “We need to urgently prevent illegal immigrants from voting in our elections before it’s too late,” said Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA).
“Let’s stop illegal immigrants from voting on November 5th and ensure that the will of the American people is reflected in how our government is funded next year.” Posts The group’s chairman, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), recently lost his re-election bid in his party’s primary.
The idea was also backed by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Trump ally, who posted on the site formerly known as Twitter in response to a repost of the Freedom Caucus statement, “This is the right way to do it.”
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) In an op-ed on Fox NewsOn Monday, he urged Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to take up the bill in the Senate, but he stopped short of supporting making passage of the bill a condition for avoiding a government shutdown.
Most elections Experts believe foreign votes are not a problem At the federal level, consistent with the view of congressional Democrats, the bill is a solution in search of a problem.
In 2016, North Carolina found that 41 non-citizen legal immigrants had cast ballots out of 4.8 million votes cast. In 2022, Georgia announced that 1,634 non-citizens had attempted to register to vote, but all were caught and none actually made it onto the voting rolls.
Still, the Trump campaign is urging the House to vote on the SAVE Act, saying foreigners voting is a problem. At a Capitol Hill press conference on the east steps of the House of Representatives Stephen Miller, a former Trump administration official, was also present and acknowledged in May that hard data was lacking.
“We all know intuitively that a lot of illegal immigrants vote in federal elections, but that’s not something that’s easy to prove,” Johnson said. “We don’t have the numbers.”
