Calling it “unserious and unacceptable,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries rejected on Monday a proposal from Speaker Mike Johnson that links continued government funding for six months with a measure to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
The response frames the spending battle to come over the next weeks as lawmakers work to reach consensus on a short-term spending bill that would prevent a partial government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Lawmakers hope to avoid a shutdown just weeks before voters go to the polls.
Johnson is punting the final decisions on full-year spending into next year when a new president and Congress take over. He’s doing so at the urging of members within his conference who believe that Republicans will be in a better position next year to secure the funding and policy priorities they want.
What a fucking pathetic process to have to hear about every year.
Every few weeks/months even.
For a party that used to be obsessed about “pork” it it ridiculous. Just pass a budget. Unacceptable. There are jobs, programs, and support networks on the line.
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it’s bonkers to me that having ID is not mandatory in the US. do all these rednecks think that SSN is number of the beast or something
in my country, you have to have ID and you have to register mail address with the govt (as an official way of delivering documents but not only) this address is also used to automatically register for voting at closest pooling station which is in general less than 1km away in cities and there’s one within every village 500 or so or more. for actual voting most of people bring ID, but driving license, passport or official govt app with digital ID is also allowed
it’s bonkers to me that having ID is not mandatory in the US. do all these rednecks think that SSN is number of the beast or something
The real problem isn’t convincing people they should get an ID. The problem is that there is no existing federal ID standard outside a passport, and getting a passport takes a significant amount of time and money. In most states, you do have to have an ID to at least register to vote, and in many you have to show ID when voting, it’s just that the requirements for ID vary from state to state and, again, there’s no federal standard. The Republicans screaming for voter ID laws know all this, but they refuse to do anything to fix it first. Make of that what you will.
On top of all that, there is zero evidence that we have a problem with non-citizens trying to vote. It just doesn’t happen. Why would they? What would they possibly have to gain by taking the risk of being caught?
i get what is going on and what republicans are trying to achieve with that, it’s just baffling to me that there’s no federal ID standard. would all/majority of states need to approve of it separately or something like this?
Nah, you only need that level of approval for a constitutional amendment. Something like this just needs to get through congress.
To be fair, I should amend my earlier statement to say that there kinda-sorta is a federal standard. It just isn’t very good. In 2005, congress passed the Real ID act, which was intended to allow state-issued IDs to include a special rider that indicates it is approved at the federal level. The implementation of this law has been pushed back several times, but it goes into effect sometime next year, at which point it will not be possible to board an airplane in the US without a passport or some other Real ID-compliant form of ID.
It sounds great on the surface, but the downside is that the cost of implementing these IDs is being passed on to the individuals, and it requires a bunch of extra documentation. So getting a Real ID is nearly as expensive and difficult as getting a US passport. But it’s less useful because it’s only recognized inside the US. So if they require one to vote, that’s yet another way to disenfranchise the poor.
What we should be doing is issuing passports to anyone that qualifies for free. But doing that would require a huge expansion of the state department because they can barely keep up with the current demand as it is.
the voter id thing is over simplified, easy sound bite, misdirection selected because having an id to vote has a broad consensus with everybody so long as you don’t look beyond the surface of what it actually means:
voters in this country already have id’s and have to show id to vote so they’re not referring to the act of voting; they’re referring to the act of registering to vote because the federal government doesn’t define it well so the states insert their own version of it and most of the state governments in this country are republican which use “voter id” as a means to suppress democrat voters within their jurisdictions.
in other words: if you cannot register to vote, then you are not allowed to vote; it doesn’t matter that the federal government could recognize your id as legitimate for voting, it only matters than your state does and your state is not legally required to match the federal government’s definition of acceptable voting id if it existed. conservative states know this; are a solid majority in this country and are using their majority position to pressure the federal government into adopting it to suppress the other party’s voters.
for decades, the conservative state and city governments have been receiving financial and advisory support from dark monied astro-turfed conservative movements that have spent millions of dollars and decades worth of experiments on cherry picked court cases and using their relationship with the governments to test out policies that could have the effect that conservatives desire to see in our society. using “voter id” is something that they spent a lot of time and money and effort reviewing over and over again and it was money will spent because now people think they know what it means based on it’s name; but that understanding is shallow.
The next Congress could use its majority to change the rules of the game. Every Dem majority since the '09 Obama supermajority had this power.
But I bet they won’t.
But I bet they won’t.
they literally didn’t the last time around like they didn’t every single time before then; why would they next time?
require proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
Calling it “unserious and unacceptable” is too nice. They need to call it like it is.
“You purposefully are including what you know to be unworkable items so you can claim we don’t care about election integrity and shut down the government so you can scream ‘The Democrats are letting illegals vote’ which is clearly not true, or barring that, trying to muscle us into disenfranchising millions of US citizen voters.”
Proof of citizenship:
You should twe…x…Twix that quote to @mikejohnson or whatever. Your writing just flows, it’s awesome.
If you frame it like that, there will be a lot of doctors getting calls about erections lasting longer than 4 hours.
make a free national voter ID law first, then when everyone has one lets talk about requiring this bullshit.
Repubs despise this idea for some reason, but isn’t this a compromise that gets them exactly what they want? They couldn’t possibly be saying one thing but actually wanting a different outcome, right?
they’ve always fought a federal ID as far as I can remember. Its similar to how most talk about the border then like staff their mansions with undocumented immigrants. Or how they talk about the deficit and inflation then skyrocket both. They know the media is owned by their friends and will shield them from any sort of accountability.
Truthfully, I wish we had a consistent ID system in general across the country. The varied IDs that each state produces make for a lot of confusion and loopholes that bad actors can take advantage of. Creating an identification number with even a low level of security in it would be a huge plus too. SSN’s are so fucking easy to just simply guess it’s not even funny. 😒
my guess is that why republicans like it how it is: making government more fractured and complicated makes it easier for people to buy into their narratives about deregulation.
They don’t want a national ID system because then they couldn’t pull any of this garbage and obstruct people’s right to vote.
Don’t we already have a national id in social security number tied to our personal profile?
Only as a byproduct of social security itself. It’s really just people taking advantage of the fact we’re all assigned a unique number. It was not really originally intended to do anything but access social security so it lacks information required for proper identification. Also most things that need ID require 2 forms of it so social security card alone won’t cut it.
You can’t use you social security card to apply for a home in most states. Need a full on state id or some other photo identification.
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So what happens if there is a shutdown when the election is supposed to happen?
Elections are run by the states, not by the federal government. Also, even in a shutdown some level of spending continues.
I dont get it. What is the down side of implementing this policy?
sound reasonable to me that you only want to allow legal citizens to vote as per law
Edit:
@[email protected] had shared a good article covering all points in the comments and more
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/11/nx-s1-4991903/voter-registration-proof-of-citizenship-requirement.
I also want seize the opportunity to thank everyone who took the time to downvote my question
In case you’re asking in good faith… The downside is that non-citizens voting is simply not a problem. The number of cases is extremely low, there’s nothing to “fix” here. The biggest impact of this policy would be that actual American citizens who do not have, or lost, or forgot to bring their proof of citizenship will not be able to vote. It will predominantly affect poor and marginal populations. People that don’t have a passport, don’t have easy access to their birth certificate, or aren’t aware of the new regulation. Fewer people voting is 100% the goal with this policy.
We also have real world examples like Alabama passing a voter ID law and then almost immediately turning around and closing DMV offices in poor, black counties, making getting an ID even more difficult for at-risk communities:
Voter ID laws are very much about cloaking intentional disenfranchisement of legal citizens in a veil of preventing virtually non-existent voter fraud.
To get a non-drivers license ID in Wisconsin requires you to go to the DMV on the 5th Wednesday of the month.
Its really bizzare that a national ID is not implemented on federal level. Am learning lot of things from this thread.
Bizarre? No. Intentionally limiting. Hateful, bigoted, and selfish.
imo wouldn’t it be a better spend electorally just to help everyone get a passport than to donate to a political campaign who will just use it to buy ads on conservative media?
The implementation is usually the issue. If white people/wealthy don’t need to show documentation, for instance. Or they only check areas that are known democrat (or known Republican). And, at the end of the day, many people can’t necessarily prove it, and the government does not guarantee free/quick access to citizenship documents, so it disproportionately affects poorer people.
Imagine if they changed this law 2 weeks before an election, and your birth certificate is in Clark county Texas while you live in Florida. It is a very easy way to disenfranchise voters and skew election results.
Eta: there’s also no robust evidence that there is almost any voter fraud, much less wide spread. Especially around citizenship. Why risk deportation/prison to vote? So this probably won’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist, and will create “unintended” consequences for legitimate voters.
I have 3 siblings, for a grand total of 6 in my family. Only my mom and I have passports. At present, despite all of us being born in the states and naturalized, only two of us have passports. So only two of us have standardized federal IDs that prove our citizenship. RealIDs are becoming more common, but nowhere near as common as a standard state driving license which does not prove citizenship.
So the requirement is going to require people to grab their birth certificates and social security cards which are not always available to every family member.
For example, my parents live out of state and have all the important family documents so 2 of siblings are screwed unless they make sure to grab those relatively sensitive documents and be prepared to carry them out and about then hang on to them for several hours.
It’s impractical, and it wasn’t a problem for the years leading up to my birth (96), wasn’t a problem in '00 for bush, or '04 for bush, or '08 and '12 for Obama. It’s suddenly become a problem because the GOP is getting called out for election shenanigans and they generally know unless they can make voting more difficult or less representative (through gerrymandering and goofy election maps) they will lose.
It does sound reasonable, but the existing mechanisms of enforcement and fraud detection have been, and continue to be, robust enough to keep voter fraud from having any meaningful statistically significant impact.
It only stands to make voting more difficult for most people.
Thank you. I wrongly assumed every American citizen has a national ID that they could just present during registratiin
Because it’s easy at the local level to selectivity apply the rules and only allow the people you want to vote. Here is an actual literacy test that was used. Hint if you were white you passed if not you failed.
I’m a college educated person. Based on this test, I don’t think the racists would have let me vote in Louisiana.
It’s not meant to be able to be passed. It’s just a way of giving them a reason to deny you a vote if your skin was the wrong color.
“Draw a line around the shortest word in this line.”
You can’t draw a line around something. It’s not a line then. Fucking hell.
Why are we talking about literacy test? The article says requiring proof ofbcitizenship. as I understand it, uts as simple as presenting national ID or passport
What national ID?
The US doesn’t have a national ID card. I have a federally-issued ID card as a lawful permanent resident, but the typical US citizen has what? Their main proof of citizenship is their birth certificate, issued by their state, and doesn’t have a photo (and if it did, would probably be a baby photo). The people with passports tend to have enough money to travel internationally, which is a pretty small proportion of the population (as it’s a big country, so even a lot of people who can afford vacations will vacation in the next state over at most).
Most people don’t have a passport. It is expensive and a pain to get one. If you don’t ever leave the country, most see no reason to. We don’t have national IDs, but we do have state. Technically, they rolled out this new RealID crap that is probably closer to a national id, but you have to pay extra and it is still done through the state. Neither of these are required. If you drive, your drivers license is your ID. Otherwise, you can get a state id so you can get alcohol, weed, cigarettes, and other dumb shit. When you get your ID, you can register to vote right there if you qualify and I think you can get a paper card. There is no reason to go through any extra hoops once you register to vote. You are in the system as a registered voter.
Real ID is a joke anyway. I have an Illinois real ID and it’s just the driver’s license with a star stamped on it, basically. I compared old and new and that was the difference - that stupid star. Other than that, it was just providing all the documentation you would use to get a passport.
Fucking joke.
We’re talking about the history of racist voter disenfranchisement and this literacy test was a prime example of that from our recent past. Although national IDs exist they are VERY far from common and they are often relatively difficult, time consuming, and expensive to get.
How many forms of ID do I need to prove I’m a citizen. Is a State issued ID enough, or will I need to bring my Passport, Social Security Card and Birth Certificate? How long will each one of these forms of ID take to be verified and by what authority?
The point is you’re creating artificial barriers to real citizens voting while claiming its stopping the non-citizens voting. Especially in a country where voter registration is up to the individual and managed at the county level. It’s not like genuine citizens are being enrolled in childhood and never have to update it and so they never have to worry about presenting their ID.
Has anyone ever explained to you how Digital Rights Management only harms paying customers and pirates get a superior media experience? This is something like that.
This really only harms real US citizens and the number of people trying to vote illegally are probably already savvy enough to have falsified but realistic documentation, so like pirates, they’re getting a superior experience while you harm the experience of real citizens.
Here’s an excellent article explaining how this would affect underrepresented groups more than others: https://www.npr.org/2024/06/11/nx-s1-4991903/voter-registration-proof-of-citizenship-requirement.
Thank you. That was a good read. I’ll put it in my main post.
Very welcome! Thanks for promoting the info. I’m sure a lot of people have the same question but haven’t asked.
Others have given good explanations, so let me just follow them and say voter ID laws are a fix to a non-issue that has the convenient effect of making certain demographics unable to vote where they could and did before without a problem, legally.
It’s classism and racism all wrapped up in a made up problem to solve, designed to maintain power that would be lost if everyone eligible to vote could vote.
Noncitizens are already not voting. There are more Repubs’ deceased grandmothers voting than noncitizens voting.
I’m fairly certain most rich people cast ballots in multiple states. A federal voter ID system would prevent this by being able to track poll location, but obviously the republican solution wouldn’t stop illegal acts by rich people.
The other crazy part is a law requiring states to establish citizenship… which is solely the responsibility of the feds.
I disagree. I think nobody would do that because the consequences of committing voter fraud are so far beyond the worth of a single extra vote that the attempt doesn’t make sense.
