A president who cares about a particular policy or piece of legislation is typically a president who can speak fluently on the subject.
By that measure, the war in Iran does not seem to be much of a priority for President Trump. Since he began the conflict, he has struggled to explain the nation’s war aims, much less give a coherent account of his decision to launch the attack or how he might bring the war to an end.
Nor do his immigration policies appear to meet that standard. He hardly speaks about them other than to praise the actions of ICE or the Department of Homeland Security or to offer some perfunctory justification for his brutal treatment of immigrants, legal and undocumented alike.
One thing he is fixated on, however, is the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — a broad set of new voting restrictions.
As the president sees it, and as the name would have you believe, the SAVE Act is meant to secure American elections against corruption and malfeasance. “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website this month. “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.”
But to this president, as we should know by now, a “rigged” election is one that he lost or did not win to his satisfaction. To Trump, the 2016 presidential election, in which he won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, was “rigged.” So was 2020, where he lost outright and then led his supporters in a failed but destructive effort to “stop the steal.” And had Trump lost the 2024 presidential election, we can be certain he would have denounced that one as rigged as well.
For reasons of both ego and ideology, Trump does not believe that he can legitimately lose an election. He is, to his mind, the living embodiment of the nation. If he doesn’t win, then the system must be broken. In that sense, the SAVE Act is far less about American elections as they exist than it is about the president’s vision of American society. The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump.
The SAVE Act is an attempt to make that distinction a political reality by removing as many mere Americans from the voting pool as possible and elevating the “true” people of the United States — who just so happen to support Trump and the Republican Party — as the only legitimate players in American political life. The goal, then, is to nationalize something akin to what many Americans experienced in the Jim Crow South: a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.
Supporters of the bill might say that this is ridiculous — that the SAVE Act is nothing more than an attempt to impose a reasonable requirement for identification on anyone who hopes to vote. “We have to show ID for almost everything that we do here in America,” Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of Tennessee, said in a Fox News interview on Sunday. “I do not understand why exercising one of the most precious rights as an American is not one of those issues that Democrats can support.”
Other Republicans, including the president, say that we need this law to stem the tide of a supposed flood of noncitizen voting. “This will be one of the most important votes that members of this chamber will ever take in their entire careers,” Speaker Mike Johnson said of a vote on a version of the SAVE Act two years ago. “Should Americans and Americans alone determine the outcome of American elections? Or should we allow foreigners and illegal immigrants to decide who sits in the White House and in the people’s House and in the Senate?”
Both noncitizen voting and in-person voter fraud are virtually nonexistent. They simply do not happen. Election officials aren’t flying blind, either; every state that requires voter registration requires some identification to register, and 36 states have explicit voter ID laws. No matter where you vote in the United States, you must at some point prove your residence and identity.
The SAVE Act would go beyond simple voter ID to impose a national citizenship requirement. To register to vote, you would have to prove that you are an American citizen. And the only acceptable documents under the law are a passport, a Real ID that verifies citizenship, a valid military or tribal ID or a U.S. birth certificate.
You do not need a sharp mind to see the problems here. Roughly half of Americans do not have a passport, and millions of people, especially older Americans, lack easy access to their birth certificates. Overall, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, an estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million Americans, do not have ready access to documents that could prove their citizenship.
It’s not as if a passport is free, either. The minimum cost to obtain a passport is $165, plus the time needed to submit the application, which must be done at an official location. Neither is a birth certificate, which costs money as well. And of course, you need a birth certificate to obtain a passport. Consider, too, the millions of American women who, upon marriage, took their husband’s last name and may need to get a new birth certificate to register to vote.
It gets worse.
The SAVE Act requires prospective voters to register in person, a serious obstacle for the tens of millions of Americans who are infirm or disabled, rely on public transportation or live in rural areas, far from a government office. It requires states to submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to run through its much-criticized citizenship verification program and mandates that states purge those rolls every 30 days, whether or not there is an election on the horizon. If you happen to move and fail to immediately update your address, you could be forced to go through a cumbersome process to reregister — assuming you’ve been notified of your lapsed registration.
The SAVE Act effectively bans universal mail voting — a bête noire of the president — and places a strict ID requirement on voting itself. And all of this would be carried out and interpreted by a federal government that, in the hands of Trump and other like-minded Republicans, is a tool of partisan warfare. The same Trump State Department that trawls the social media activity of Americans for evidence of wrong-think might, under this law, refuse passports to those it suspects of Democratic sympathies. Similarly, a Trump Justice Department might openly push states to remove specific people from their voting pools on the basis of speech or perceived political affiliation.
All of this, in a literal sense, recapitulates the electoral mechanisms of Jim Crow, whose hurdles, obstacles and restrictions relied on both blunt force and bureaucratic discretion to exclude Black Americans (and a large number of white ones as well) from the pool of voters. For a literacy test, a Jim Crow registrar might ask a white would-be voter to recite the ABCs. She might ask a Black would-be voter, by contrast, to recite the Constitution from memory. She might even administer a test that, by design, can’t be passed, meant to keep even the most determined Black person from the ballot box.
Given the number of new requirements Americans would be forced to meet, the SAVE Act might allow for the kind of discretion that can easily abet voter suppression. If nothing else, by forcing Americans to obtain proof of citizenship if they hope to vote, it all but requires them to pay a poll tax — something outlawed by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution. And while it is true that Congress has the constitutional authority to establish national voting rules, it is also the case that through the 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th and 26th Amendments, the Constitution presumes something like an affirmative right to vote for the presidency and other federal offices. This makes the SAVE Act, which would intentionally disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans, not just unconstitutional in its provisions but anti-constitutional in its fundamental contempt for popular sovereignty and rule by the governed.
Here again, a supporter of the law might cry foul. But you need only read what the president says about the proposal. Speaking to congressional Republicans, Trump said that the law would “guarantee the midterms” for the Republican Party.
Now, if we step back and look at the composition of the American electorate, the reality is that the SAVE Act might work against the Republican Party. Married women, especially those who have taken their husband’s last name, are a Republican-leaning group. So are Americans without passports, who tend not to have college degrees. And those Americans most likely to lack the personal or civic resources to obtain documentation on short notice are the low-propensity voters that put Trump over the top in 2016 and 2024 — the same voters that Republicans need in November. Republican voters have also made great use of mail-in voting in the states where it is available.
Far from neutering the Democratic Party, the SAVE Act might improve its ability to win big in this year’s midterms as a result of education polarization and a stark difference in enthusiasm between the two parties.
But Trump and his allies think otherwise, and intent matters. The point of the SAVE Act, for them, is to use a ginned-up panic over noncitizen voting to disenfranchise the tens of millions of Americans who oppose the president and who have, as a result, been placed outside the political community. The SAVE Act embodies Trump and the Republican Party’s astonishing contempt for the idea that a fair election is one in which you can vote without being hassled by the state.
This week, Senate Republicans intend to put the bill up for debate, and odds are good that it will fall to a Democratic filibuster. “We are ready to be here all day, all night, as long as it takes to ensure the powers of voter suppression do not win the day,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, as Republicans opened debate on the proposal. But Americans wondering what to think about the SAVE Act should consider it a direct attack on their fundamental right to vote, to choose their leaders free of coercion and interference. It is a bill that imagines the American people as little more than subjects to a president who playacts as a king.
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