Strictly speaking, the House of Representatives is not voting this week on President Trump’s long-demanded federal elections overhaul that would impose nationwide voter identification and proof of citizenship requirements and limit voting by mail.
Lawmakers are scheduled instead to vote on Wednesday on the annual defense policy bill, which authorizes more than $1 trillion in military spending; a $95 billion budget plan to pay for the war in Iran; and legislation that would impose restrictions on stock trading by lawmakers.
But Republicans have tied all three of those measures to pieces of the SAVE America Act, the elections bill Mr. Trump has called his top priority. The tactic is aimed at forcing action in the Senate, where the bill is stalled amid bipartisan opposition.
The moves are the latest sign that the G.O.P. has subjugated its entire legislative agenda, months before midterm elections in which its congressional majorities are in peril, to the president’s obsession with cracking down on election fraud that he claims, despite evidence to the contrary, is rampant.
Under a complex maneuver the G.O.P. engineered on Tuesday, if the defense bill passes, it will be merged with major pieces of the voting restriction legislation, which the House passed in February, before being sent to the Senate. The budget plan includes $10 billion that could be used for enforcing new voting requirements, which is aimed at allowing Republicans to try to include the SAVE Act in a party-line, filibuster-proof budget measure they want to push through Congress. And the stock trading bill includes an unrelated provision requiring photo identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail.
The convergence of the SAVE America Act with unrelated measures springs from Speaker Mike Johnson’s efforts to placate Mr. Trump and far-right House Republicans who are furious that the voting restriction bill has run aground in the Senate. The moves are unlikely to budge Senate Republicans; they consider the bill dead, given that it cannot draw the 60 votes needed to move forward in that chamber.
But Mr. Johnson had to try. Republican hard-liners had blockaded the House floor over the matter, refusing to move on any legislation until the SAVE Act advanced.
So he agreed to use an arcane procedural tactic that appends a version of the SAVE America Act to all major bills the House considers before sending them to the Senate. The appended version does not include Mr. Trump’s desired restrictions on voting by mail, which are opposed by a significant number of Republicans.
If the defense bill passes, attached provisions would require Americans to show documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and to show specific forms of photo identification at the polls. The House also attached those measures last week to a bill that funds the State Department and foreign aid programs.
These moves are largely symbolic. The Senate has its own versions of the defense policy bill and the foreign affairs spending measure and is not expected to adopt the House’s bills.
The budget plan, the first step in a special legislative process known as reconciliation that would allow senators to bypass the filibuster and Democratic opposition, includes $10 billion for the House Administration Committee. That panel handles federal elections legislation, and the money would go toward making changes in laws under its jurisdiction.
But it is not clear whether that measure has sufficient support in the Senate, where many Republicans are skeptical of the effort. And it is equally unclear whether reconciliation can be used for pieces of the elections bill, since the process has strict rules requiring that all provisions make direct changes to spending or revenue.
Republicans also added voting measures to the stock trading bill, which would bar members of Congress from buying individual stocks but allow them to keep and sell existing ones. The added measures would require Americans to show certain forms of photo ID in order to vote, including if they were voting by mail.
Democrats are solidly opposed to the elections legislation, which they argue would suppress voting by making it more difficult for eligible voters to gain access to the polls.
Though many Democrats back the stock-trading limits for lawmakers, most are expected to oppose the bill on Wednesday, on the ground that the voter identification restrictions Republicans inserted have made the measure unacceptable.
The post In the House, All Roads Lead to the SAVE America Act appeared first on New York Times.
