By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
Congress is enjoying a long July Fourth recess, which is a convenient cover for its current state of total paralysis. Donald Trump and his most fervent acolytes in both the House and Senate want to suspend all legislative activity to make passage of the SAVE America Act the sole priority. From the president’s twisted point of view, it makes sense. He has claimed many times that Democrats only win elections through fraud, like counting illegal mail ballots and letting millions of noncitizens vote. Keeping that from happening is job one, and any Republican who doesn’t get on the bandwagon is obviously rejecting the core MAGA belief that immigration and its associated pathologies have brought America to the brink of extinction.
Unfortunately, Trump has had a lot of trouble settling on a specific remedy. The original SAVE Act, later rebranded as the SAVE America Act to reflect Trump’s apocalyptic view of its importance, focused on creating a national voter-registration system that included elaborate proof-of-citizenship requirements and a foundation for constant federally supervised voting-roll purges. Several versions have passed the Republican-controlled House three times, most recently in February. But now the president is insisting on a “full version” that includes radical restrictions on voting by mail and non-germane bans on the participation of transgender people in sports and gender-affirming surgery on minors.
