A group of hardline House Republican conservatives and libertarians named their price Monday for keeping the government open past Sept. 30: passage of a bill against illegal voting that most experts say isn’t needed.
The government’s day-to-day operations — most federal agencies and the programs they provide, aside from Social Security and Medicare — are funded through Sept. 30. But to keep the government open past that date and past the general election on Nov. 5 will require a temporary spending bill to be passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, a so-called continuing resolution.
“Furthermore, the Continuing Resolution should include the [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility] Act — as called for by President Trump — to prevent non-citizens from voting to preserve free and fair elections in light of the millions of illegal aliens imported by the Biden-Harris administration over the last four years,” the House Freedom Caucus said in a social media post.
The bill is ostensibly aimed at preventing undocumented immigrants from voting in federal elections, something already illegal and, according to election experts, so exceedingly rare as to not be an issue.
But the bill has appeared to be a pet project of the Trump campaign as a way to put Democrats on the spot ahead of the election about the number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border in recent years. The House already passed the bill in July, with five Democrats joining with Republicans. Senate Democrats have shown no willingness to bring the bill up there.
Lawmakers are away from Washington until the second week of September for their traditional summer break. They’re scheduled to return in a few weeks, when the main item of business will be finding a way to keep the government open so they can leave again to campaign in October and early November.
It is not unusual for Republicans to try to leverage funding deadlines in order to pass other legislation, but no shutdown has taken place within weeks of a presidential election and it’s unlikely all House Republicans would go along with such a plan.
But that did not keep Freedom Caucus members from saying they supported the idea Monday.
“Any short-term spending bill MUST include the SAVE Act,” posted Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) “It’s imperative that we prevent illegals from voting in our elections before it’s too late.”
“Let’s prevent illegals from voting on Nov 5, and let the will of the American people be reflected in how the government is funded next year,” posted Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), the chair of the group who recently lost his reelection bid in his party primary.
The idea also got an endorsement from a pro-Trump Senate Republican, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who on the site formerly known as Twitter posted, “This is the way” over a repost of the Freedom Caucus statement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in an op-ed for Fox News, called on Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) Monday to bring up the bill in the Senate but he stopped short of endorsing the idea of making its passage a condition to keep the government open.
Most elections experts view voting by non-citizens as a non-issue at the federal level, in line with congressional Democrats’ view the bill is a solution in search of a problem.
In 2016, North Carolina found 41 legal immigrants who were not citizens voted, out of 4.8 million votes cast. In 2022, Georgia said 1,634 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote but all of them were caught and none actually got on voting rolls.
That hasn’t kept the Trump campaign from saying that noncitizen voting is an issue and pushing the House to vote on the SAVE Act. Johnson, at a Capitol Hill press conference on the east steps of the House of Representatives and accompanied by former Trump administration official Stephen Miller, acknowledged in May hard data was lacking.
“We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable,” Johnson said. “We don’t have that number.”