The fight ain't over till the fat lady sings. The #SaveAct is not happening. The House passed the tougher #SAVE America Act back in February by a vote of two eighteen to two thirteen... nearly along party lines. Since then it's hit wall after wall in the Senate. A reconciliation attempt failed by a vote of forty eight to fifty... with four Republican senators joining Democrats to block it. And just yesterday... an effort to attach the bill to the defense authorization act... using a tactic they're calling "MIRVing"... also went down, with some Republicans warning it wouldn't survive Senate rules anyway. Former President Trump continues to call the bill his top priority... and has reportedly held up other legislation over it.
The Supreme Court closed its term with a major ruling... striking down the president's executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship... The vote was six to three... Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority... saying citizenship is, quote... the right to have rights... and that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every person born on American soil... In the same term, the Court also upheld state bans on transgender athletes in women's sports... and struck down federal limits on political party campaign spending.
Now... a closer look at a bill back in the headlines... the SAVE Act... formally the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act... Its sponsors say it protects elections by requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote... and photo ID to cast a ballot... But the numbers tell a more complicated story... Utah reviewed over two million registered voters and found exactly one confirmed noncitizen registration... zero instances of noncitizen voting... Meanwhile, in Kansas, a similar law blocked roughly thirty one thousand eligible citizens from registering... twelve percent of applicants... while catching a noncitizen rate of about zero point zero zero two percent... An estimated nine percent of eligible voters nationwide lack easy access to the required documents... with women, rural voters, older Americans, and people with disabilities facing the steepest hurdles... A push this week to attach the bill to the defense policy bill failed... after Republican holdouts objected... The measure remains stalled in the Senate... short of the sixty votes needed... even as a dozen states have passed similar laws of their own since twenty twenty four.
