Targeting elections, House GOP advances the SAVE America Act, a solution in search of a problem

A couple of years ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson made a pilgrimage of sorts to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump’s ring and hold a joint news conference with the then-former president. It was not, however, a simple photo-op: The Republicans unveiled a proposal they appeared to be rather proud of.

The GOP duo pitched legislation that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. The absurdity of watching two notorious election deniers pretend to be deeply concerned with the integrity of elections was a detail the political world was apparently supposed to overlook.

Soon after, House Republicans followed through, introducing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, a version of which passed the GOP-led chamber last year.

In time, however, Trump and his party decided their own plan wasn’t quite far enough to the right. So they overhauled it, made it worse and gave it a new name: the SAVE America Act.

Trump doesn’t have much of a legislative agenda, but he insisted that House Republicans pass this bill. And as is too often the case, GOP lawmakers did as the White House instructed.

The final vote was 218-213, with Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas being the only Democrat to vote for passage.

The original SAVE Act was an indefensible step backward, and the revised version is worse:

• All Americans would be required to prove their U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.
• Voters would be required under federal law to present identification when casting ballots in person or by mail, even in states that do not have voter ID laws.
• Republicans are eyeing new restrictions on Americans who want to vote by mail.

The proposal is a classic example of a solution in search of a problem. Republicans have spent years desperately searching for evidence of systemic fraud in vote-by-mail systems, for example, and they’ve come up empty. The same is true about the supposed need for voter ID laws: In reality, there is simply no national scourge of people trying to cast ballots while pretending to be someone else.

As for the idea of creating a federal law to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote, the proposal is redundant: There are literally zero locations in the United States where noncitizens can vote in federal elections. What’s more, GOP officials have searched far and wide for evidence of noncitizens casting ballots in significant numbers — and they have found effectively nothing.

Some on the right have argued that the legislation is worthwhile anyway, even if there’s no evidence to support its goals, in part because it might make the Republicans’ base feel better — these voters’ confidence in the system has apparently been shaken by years’ worth of baseless partisan conspiracy theories — and in part because it’ll create safeguards against future hypothetical mischief.

Except that’s wrong, too. Policymakers are not supposed to add new and entirely unnecessary hurdles for Americans who want to participate in their own country’s elections, likely disenfranchising millions, simply because of hypothetical threats and conspiracy theorists’ feelings.

What’s more, as The Associated Press reportedstate elections officials — from both parties — have expressed practical concerns about how these costly proposed procedures would be implemented and paid for. The same article added: “Voting rights groups have said married women who have changed their name could have trouble registering under the SAVE Act because their birth certificate lists their maiden name.”

Despite all of this, the bill passed the House anyway.

The proposal now heads to the Republican-led Senate, where it will need to overcome a 60-vote threshold, which seems exceedingly unlikely. That said, Politico reported this week that GOP leaders are so desperate to fundamentally alter how Americans vote that they’re exploring potential procedural changes that would make it possible to pass the regressive legislation, despite existing cloture rules.

Watch this space.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”