Trump undercuts Trump in argument for bogus ‘SAVE America Act’ | Opinion
.jpg "A woman advocates for democracy at Saturday's’ “No Kings” protest in Wichita.")
President Donald Trump has just admitted what I’ve been saying all along: His so-called “SAVE America Act” is an act — a piece of political performance art that’s totally unnecessary to protect the integrity of our elections.
Trump’s admission comes in the form of an executive order he signed Tuesday called “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”
In it, Trump admits hands-down that the government already knows if you’re a citizen or not.
So there’s literally no legitimate reason to force millions of American citizens to buy (from the government) and present (to the government) copies of their birth certificates, marriage licenses and divorce decrees to prove their eligibility to register to vote.
“The Social Security Administration (SSA) maintains records that, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements . . . can assist in verifying identity and Federal election voter eligibility,” the executive order states.
That’s a pretty self-damning admission from a president who’s sworn up and down that it’s so important for people to collect and show their papers that he won’t sign any bills into law until Congress gives him his way.
Trump’s order continues: “The Secretary of Homeland Security, through the Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and in coordination with the Commissioner of SSA, shall take appropriate action to compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State (State Citizenship List). The State Citizenship List shall be derived from Federal citizenship and naturalization records, SSA records, SAVE data, and other relevant Federal databases.”
Seems like if the goal was to prevent noncitizens from voting, it could have been done all along without making legitimate voters jump through bureaucratic hoops.
But this executive order comes after more than a month of Trump temper tantrums and threats to try to break a Senate filibuster of the SAVE America Act, which would more accurately be called the SAVE America from Democracy Act.
The order exposes the SAVE Act for exactly what it is and always has been, an attempt to suppress the votes of millions of Americans to make it easier for the people in power to stay in power.
The political theory behind it is that people of lower economic means would give up on voting if the party in power — Republican in name only — could erect enough time-consuming and costly hurdles to registration.
Kansas was the test laboratory for this theory and we were all the Guinea pigs. And it worked exactly as designed.
Under the Kansas version of the SAVE Act (called the SAFE Act, Born 2011, Died 2020) then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach was able to suspend the voting rights of 31,000 legitimate U.S. citizens under the fictional rubric that he was protecting our elections from illegal immigrants voting. He kept at until the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals made him stop and ordered that the citizens be added to the voter rolls.
Meanwhile, as secretary of state and in his current role as attorney general, Kobach has exercised prosecutorial power over election violations for more than 10 years. During that time, he has prosecuted — as far as anyone can tell — a total of three foreigners, all legal residents, who were more confused than criminal.
With his executive order, Trump did what he always does — creates a problem, backs off, then declares victory and congratulates himself for solving said problem.
He did it with tariffs, throwing the world economy into chaos by announcing egregious taxes on goods imported to the U.S., which he then dialed back down while claiming credit for restoring stability to international markets that he disrupted in the first place.
He did it with Iran, starting a war and then changing his victory conditions from “unconditional surrender” of the Islamic Republic to eliciting a promise that Iran won’t build atomic bombs (which was already the status quo when he took office).
He did it with air travel. Millions of Americans stood in hours-long lines for airport screening while he fought with Congress over funding for the Department of Homeland Security. When people started blaming the Republicans for the standoff, he announced with great fanfare that the administration would start paying its TSA agents again, which he obviously could have been doing all along.
When will the people who support this guy realize they’re being played? Honestly, probably never. He’s been doing it a long time and they haven’t so far.
But it looks like the rest of us might at least get to vote without having to buy documents from one government office and hand-carrying them to another government office.
Progress of a sort, I guess.
