And this time, they mean to win.
The GOP bill, a direct product ofPresident Donald Trump’s decade-long obsession with illegal voting, would require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, bar states from counting late-arriving mail ballots, and dramatically infringe on states’ authority to run elections.
[...]
The rapid-fire sequence of developments from Washington, said voting-rights experts and historians, underscores the troubling, and historically unprecedented, 180 that the age of Trump has brought. Where once the federal government operated — albeit often imperfectly — as a defender of access to the ballot and an ally of marginalized groups at risk of disenfranchisement, today it plays the opposite role: as the prime mover behind efforts to make voting more difficult, and as a champion of those seeking to permanently undermine fair elections.
[...]
The House’s action comes at a time when the U.S. Justice Department has pulled out of a slew of cases to protect minority voting rights, while offering support to election deniers and January 6 rioters. And it comes just 16 days after a White House order, already the subject of multiple lawsuits, that appears modeled on the SAVE Act and aims to require states to impose strict new voting rules that could disenfranchise millions.
[...]
The SAVE Act still faces a steep uphill climb to overcome a likely Democratic filibuster in the Senate. But with the GOP controlling Congress and the White House, tightening voting rules near the top of Trump’s agenda, and the party largely unified around the issue, the prospect of major voter suppression legislation becoming law nationwide is much closer to reality than probably ever before.
Democracy Docket
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