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Trump allies ignore laws about noncitizen­s voting

- Chris Brennan USA TODAY Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBre­nnan

Donald Trump helped save House Speaker Mike Johnson’s job Wednesday, and the Republican from Louisiana was eager to repay the favor to the former president.

That’s why Johnson made a big show on the Capitol steps Wednesday, surrounded by a crew of legislator­s and activists who tried to overturn the 2020 presidenti­al election, to push new legislatio­n to outlaw something that has already been illegal for nearly three decades.

Johnson and his allies claimed to be talking about “election integrity.” But what they really pitched was the “rigged election” disinforma­tion that Trump has been hawking for almost eight years.

This is called a “messaging” bill – legislatio­n with no chance of becoming law, written only to let politician­s spin an issue into an advantage.

And this message mixes together Trump’s favorite culture-war tropes – xenophobia about immigratio­n and an alternativ­e-facts version of how he lost the popular vote in 2016 and the presidency in 2020.

Republican­s want to solve nonexisten­t voting problem

Johnson and his election-denying schemers were pushing the new Safeguard American Voter Eligibilit­y Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenshi­p to register to vote in federal elections.

Sounds harmless, right? That’s true if you don’t know much about voting rights issues.

But like laws that some states have enacted requiring voters to show identifica­tion at polling places, this act completely ignores the fact that not everyone who is eligible to vote has access to the documents needed to establish their identity.

Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program at the nonpartisa­n Brennan Center for Justice, told me it is “infinitesi­mally rare” for noncitizen­s to vote in federal elections because existing safeguards prevent that. This is what he thinks of the so-called SAVE Act.

“It is a policy that would immediatel­y disenfranc­hise millions of eligible citizens of this country,” Morales-Doyle said, “because there are millions of eligible citizens in this country that do not have ready access to a passport or a certificat­e that has their current informatio­n on it.”

Speaker Johnson doesn’t like to be asked for proof

That’s the real motive here. Voter ID laws disproport­ionately disenfranc­hise voters who lean toward the Democratic Party. That’s no coincidenc­e.

Morales-Doyle said it has been illegal since the 1920s for noncitizen­s to vote in federal elections. Congress in 1996 codified registerin­g to vote for a federal election by a noncitizen as a federal crime eligible for prison time and fines. Then-President Bill Clinton signed that into law.

Johnson knows that. He used his Wednesday news conference as a naked political platform to push for Trump’s election in November, repeatedly citing the immigratio­n crisis at the southern border while talking about alleged voter fraud.

He was immediatel­y exasperate­d when pressed for proof. And then he just gave up the game.

“We all know intuitivel­y, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Johnson said. “But it’s not been something that is easily provable.”

Let’s translate “intuitivel­y” from Trump-speak to the real world: The House speaker was pushing a lie with the confidence that some people who hear it will be so desperate to believe it that they will set aside logic and ignore the truth.

Hey, it works with Trump and his supporters.

This new voting bill is part of a bigger Republican effort

Johnson was speaking just a few hours before a handful of Burn-It-AllDown Caucus members tried and failed to have him ousted in a motion to vacate. Those members all are dutiful Trump sycophants. But Trump didn’t back them on this. He stuck with Johnson, a handy mouthpiece for attacks on President Joe Biden about immigratio­n.

That crisis came up over and over Wednesday in a thinly veiled nod to the racist “great replacemen­t theory,” a popular but bogus claim that Democrats urge undocument­ed immigrants to come to America to become noncitizen voters in numbers that overwhelm white American voters.

Johnson visited Trump in Florida last month to jointly spout that conspiracy theory. That’s when Trump put in motion the plan to save the speaker’s job.

Here’s what they didn’t discuss at Mar-a-Lago last month or the Capitol on Wednesday: Trump and Johnson in February persuaded Republican­s in Congress to abandon a bipartisan deal on immigratio­n reform crafted by Sen. James Lankford, a conservati­ve from Oklahoma.

Trump’s reasoning – if you can call it that – was that he didn’t want Biden to score a legislativ­e win in an election year on an issue that Trump could keep criticizin­g him about.

There is bipartisan agreement that voter fraud isn’t a thing

Every state has its own laws on how elections are conducted. Federal law allows states to pass legislatio­n allowing noncitizen­s living here legally to vote in limited instances only in local elections. Laws like that exist now in 12 states and Washington, D.C.

There have long been unsubstant­iated claims about noncitizen­s voting in federal elections. Morales-Doyle said that really took off after Trump, peeved that he lost the popular vote in 2016 while winning the presidency, claimed with zero proof that 3-5 million noncitizen­s voted against him.

“Trump using that as his excuse for losing the popular vote in 2016 kind of changed the conversati­on,” MoralesDoy­le said. “And it’s not a coincidenc­e that it’s popping up again right now when Trump is once again in campaign mode.”

Trump as president even created an “election integrity” commission to prove that. The commission produced nothing but hot air on the topic before being disbanded in 2018. It was all just more empty messaging.

The Brennan Center, which arguably leans progressiv­e, and the Cato Institute, which clearly leans conservati­ve, have both studied noncitizen voting in federal elections and found it to be “vanishingl­y rare” and certainly not a factor that could “actually shift the outcome of elections.”

This bipartisan agreement shows that Trump and Johnson are pitching a solution in search of a problem, hoping that voters will just accept without much thought their shady politics on immigratio­n and lies about elections. The more you know about all that, the less you will believe them.

 ?? KENT NISHIMURA/GETTY IMAGES ?? House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibilit­y (SAVE) Act during a news conference May 8.
KENT NISHIMURA/GETTY IMAGES House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., speaks about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibilit­y (SAVE) Act during a news conference May 8.
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