WASHINGTON — Lawmakers rejected a ploy by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to combine legislation to fund the government with a right-wing bill attacking the illusory threat of illegal voting.
Johnson’s gambit failed thanks to unified opposition from Democrats, plus objections from a handful of Republicans who complained the bill didn’t cut government spending enough.
The vote tally was 202 to 220, with two House members, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) voting “present.” Fourteen Republicans broke ranks to vote with Democrats against the bill, while three Democrats voted with Republicans in favor.
The bill’s defeat did not come as a surprise — Johnson initially scheduled a vote for last week, but postponed it amid warnings from several members of his own party that they would vote against the package.
Ahead of the failed vote on Wednesday, Republicans openly talked about a plan B, and Johnson himself suggested in an extended football metaphor that he would need to call another play after this one yielded no gain.
“We’re on the field in the middle of the game, the quarterback’s calling the play, we’re going to run the play,” Johnson said. “We have a thick playbook, of course, with all sorts of ideas in it. But when you’re on the field and you’re calling a play, you run the play.”
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who voted for the bill, expressed displeasure over the outcome, particularly the number of GOP defections. “I’m disappointed with it.”
But he said Republicans will just have to go back to the drawing board.
“We’ll huddle back up,” Norman said. “With where we are now, everything’s fluid.”
One outcome several Republicans anticipate is that Johnson will move a short-term government funding bill, known as a continuing resolution, without the voter fraud language attached. Johnson himself refused to rule out passing a clean funding bill in response to a reporter’s question last week.
Former President Donald Trump, however, has repeatedly urged Republicans to shut down the government if Democrats won’t accept the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act.
“If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form,” Trump wrote Wednesday on his website. “Democrats are registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak – They will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election, and they shouldn’t be allowed to.”
Republicans have provided no evidence whatsoever that undocumented immigrants are registering to vote in massive numbers. It’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and voter registration forms already require signatories to attest to their citizenship under penalty of perjury. For those reasons, experts say, noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare.
The SAVE Act would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate, along with another form of ID, in order to register to vote. But as several Republicans admitted to HuffPost last week, most people who plan to vote in the upcoming election have already registered. Even if the bill became law this week, it would be too late for it to have much of an impact in November.
Nevertheless, Trump is using the bill to boost his false claims that Democrats are using immigrants to cheat. Similar lies about election fraud fueled an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump’s supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, part of a broader effort by Trump to undo his election loss to President Joe Biden.
Government funding runs out at the end of the month. Several Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have said a government shutdown right before the November elections would be unacceptable.
“Any shutdown would be idiotic and undermine the focus on the issues that are actually impacting the American people,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said last week. “From my standpoint, we have one job: keep the government funded and get to November. And the American people then will determine the direction of the country going forward.”
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), the lead author of the SAVE Act, told reporters before the vote that a clean government funding bill was inevitable, and he faulted his colleagues for not going along with Johnson’s plan.
“There is going to be a funding bill, and when there’s a funding bill, the people who oppose this one have to answer for why they are comfortable with siding with the Democrats,” Roy said.
“We’ve got to get back to some reasonable ways of doing things, like we do things in Tennessee. This is just not [reasonable],” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who was among the 14 Republicans who voted against the bill Wednesday.
Even as the next steps for House Republicans remained unclear, Lawler, who voted for the bill, sounded optimistic.
“Look, we’re not shutting the government down with 48 days to go in the election,” he told reporters.
