The SAVE America Act already failed once. It passed the House in February, then couldn’t find 60 votes in the Senate in June. Why? Because it’s a bill that makes it harder for eligible citizens to vote, dressed up as a fix for a fraud problem that barely exists.
So this week, House Republicans tried something else. They bolted the SAVE Act onto an unrelated, must-pass bill that funds the State Department and national security programs — hoping Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate will be too afraid to strip it back out.
There’s even a name for the maneuver on Capitol Hill: “MIRVing” — named after missiles that split into multiple warheads. That’s not lawmaking. That’s hostage-taking. And they’re using funding for our diplomats and our national security as the hostage.
Let me tell you about the bill that couldn’t pass on its own. The SAVE Act would require Americans to show original documents like a passport or birth certificate just to register to vote — in person, ending mail or online registration for millions of people. An estimated 21 million citizens don’t have that paperwork on hand. Add in the roughly 69 million women who’ve changed their name since their birth certificate was issued, rural voters who live nowhere near the office to bring documents to, and troops stationed overseas, and you start to see who actually gets hurt.
And for what? Federal data shows a whopping 0.04% of voter verification cases even flag as possible noncitizens — and most of those turn out to have already proven their citizenship. States that tried versions of this law, like Kansas and Arizona, ended up blocking tens of thousands of eligible citizens and stopping almost no noncitizens. Courts struck the laws down.
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P.S. This is genuinely the strategy Republicans are using to try to pass a bill that already failed. If that doesn’t tell you how little support it actually has, nothing will.
