Democracy Docket: Democratic Senators Slam ‘Radical’ GOP Push to ‘Make it Harder for Eligible Americans’ to Vote
By Matt Cohen
A coalition of Democratic U.S. senators, led by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), held a floor block on Wednesday to push back against the GOP-backed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.
For more than an hour, Padilla — along with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) — spoke about the dangers of the SAVE Act, along with President Donald Trump’s recent anti-voting executive order.
“In the Oval Office, the radical Republicans are actively working hard to make it harder for eligible Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote,” said Padilla, a former California secretary of state. “We see it in the endless lies and conspiracy theories about massive voter fraud. We see it in the new barriers being erected that would make it harder for eligible Americans to simply register to vote. And we see it in the Trump administration’s firing of the hardworking and dedicated security officials who are tasked with protecting our elections.”
Earlier this month, the U.S. House passed the SAVE Act, which voting rights experts and scholars, in interviews with Democracy Docket, called the “most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history.” Among other restrictions, the measure would require all Americans to provide citizenship documentation, like a birth certificate or passport, in order to vote in federal elections. That would risk disenfranchising some 69 million women who changed their names when they married, as well as millions of overseas voters — including military service members and their families.
Although the bill faces an uphill battle in the Senate — it would need 60 votes to overcome a Democratic filibuster — it’s part of a broader assault on voting rights that the senators called attention to. Trump’s recent anti-voting order would vastly expand the executive branch’s power over elections to disenfranchise millions of voters. A judge recently blocked federal agencies from implementing key components of the order.
“What’s happening is simple,” Klobuchar said. “Some people don’t want some people to vote.”
Klobuchar pointed out that the attack on voting rights isn’t just coming from the White House and congressional Republicans, but also from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which through its civil rights division has historically been the federal government’s chief enforcer of voting rights.
Trump appointed notorious anti-voting lawyer Harmeet Dhillon as the assistant attorney general to lead the DOJ’s civil rights division. Recently, the DOJ reassigned the managers of its voting section and changed its longtime mission of enforcing voting rights and laws, like the VRA, to instead “ensure that only American citizens vote in US federal elections and do so securely. Other section priorities include preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.”
“The assistant attorney general for civil rights has said that the Voting Rights Act ‘was once necessary to push back on Jim Crow laws,’” Klobchar said during Wednesday’s floor speech. “At her hearing in front of the Judiciary Committee, I asked her if she will enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act… she didn’t answer.”
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