Washington D.C. — Lawmakers continue their work on Capitol Hill this week, and there’s work to be done, as a spending plan, or an extension, needs to be adopted by the end of the month to avoid a Government shutdown.
After the August District Work Period, Congress and the U.S. Senate reconvened last week, with Republican Speaker Mike Johnson tying the “SAVE Act” to a stopgap spending measure. The proposal something Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called a “non-starter”. The “SAVE Act”, would mandate proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections for new voters.
There is no evidence of a large number of non-citizens voting in federal elections, and noncitizen voting is already illegal. Speaker Johnson pulled the measure from the floor the middle of last week after not getting the votes. Though there’s still support, some of which is coming from Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“There’s been evidence that in multiple cases [non-citizens] have voted, then you have multiple Democrat governors who have refused to clean their voter rolls, and again we want to make sure there’s identification that you are a US citizens and able to vote in U.S. elections, this is an area 87 percent of American people agree with this position,” NY 21st District House Rep Elise Stefanik says.
Jeffries has called on Democrats to reject the bill uniformly, though Republicans hope there’s some movement in battleground states on the issue. Long Island Democrat Tom Suozzi says he will not be voting for any spending bill that has the SAVE Act attached.
“It really doesn’t make any sense that they’re doing that, let’s see if they even go forward with it, they may not even have the votes,” Suozzi says. “The bottom line is, we’ve had experiences where we come close to shutting down the government and we try to avoid that because its awful for America. It affects a lot of people’s services, it reflects very poorly on the confidence in the American government. So, we have to try to do these clean, what they call continuing resolutions instead of trying put these different messaging bills as a part of it.”