Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) have endorsed a bill that would ban non-citizens from voting in federal elections — a thing that is already illegal.
If you haven’t already guessed, the legislation is a brazen stunt intended to gin up public support for a former president campaigning on an anti-immigration platform and a house speaker on the brink of being ousted by extremists in his caucus.
No state allows non-citizens to vote in federal or state elections, but there are limited instances in which residents who have not yet been naturalized are allowed to vote in local elections. But for years now, Republicans have been pushing conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, which holds that Democrats and a cabal of shady unseen political forces are importing immigrants in mass to vastly shift the electoral makeup of the country and seize permanent control of the government.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have heavily promoted baseless claims of electoral fraud as well as false assertions that elections are vulnerable to interference by non-citizen voters.
On Friday, Johnson traveled to Florida to meet with Trump for a joint press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort. Johnson declared that House Republicans will be “introducing a bill that will require proof of citizenship to vote.”
“What we’re gonna do is introduce legislation to require every single person who registers to vote in a federal election must prove that they are an American citizen first. You have to prove it,” he continued, touting the bill under the rationale of “election integrity.”
The shameless posturing over the unnecessary legislation becomes even more egregious when one remembers that in February, House Republicans set aside their self-proclaimed commitment to locking down the border and reforming the nation’s immigration laws in favor of giving the legislative middle finger to the Biden administration. Johnson and his caucus killed a massive bipartisan immigration reform package because the political benefits of continuing to complain about the border outweighed their interest in actually passing laws.
Following the Mar-a-Lago meeting, even Fox News called out Johnson’s redundancy, pointing out that in “1996 congress passed the illegal immigration reform and immigration responsibility act. That act makes it explicitly illegal for noncitizens to vote.”
Johnson is facing significant internal pressure from House Republicans, who are all but screaming that their priority for the next seven months is ensuring that former president Trump defeats Biden in the general election — even if it means shutting down the government to avoid giving the president any sort of PR win. In March, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed a motion to vacate Johnson’s speaker position, accusing him in an open letter of having “not lived up to a single one of his self-imposed tenets.”
“We could have also taken out funding for abortion and the trans agenda on kids if our own Speaker would have allowed us to offer amendments. We could have achieved other worthy victories if we had only put up a fight against Democrats. Instead, Mike Johnson worked with Chuck Schumer rather than with us, and gave Joe Biden and the Democrats everything they wanted — no different from how a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries would have done,” Greene wrote.
When asked during Friday’s press conference if he backed Greene’s motion to depose Johnson, Trump answered: “We’re getting along very well with the Speaker. And I get along very well with Marjorie.” He continued, “I think he’s doing a very good job. He’s doing about as good as you’re going to do. And I’m sure that Marjorie understands that. She’s a very good friend of mine, and I know she has a lot of respect for the Speaker.”
“I stand with the Speaker, we’ve had a very good relationship,” Trump later added.
In uniting with Trump, Johnson is attempting to tie himself to the man Republicans refuse to defy — and hopefully save his job. Unfortunately for Johnson, the House GOP has no problem crushing their leadership for sport.
