Block the Vote: 2026 Edition

The Republicans are at it again. 

The House of Representatives, for the second time in the First Reichstag (formerly the 119th Congress), passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a bill that is as committed to safeguarding American voter eligibility as North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is committed to democracy, people, or republicanism. 

But this bill is certainly connected to Republicanism.  (Not capital letter.)

The SAVE Act would ban registration by mail and require Americans to present proof of citizenship when registering with photo ID, such as passports, in every state and would require birth certificates, if presented in lieu of passports, to show names given at birth. It would also order states to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.  Well, what's so bad about that?

Quite a few things, actually.  First of all, a large number of Americans don't have passports, mainly because they don't - or mor likely, given how vacation time and discretionary money are both in short supply these days, can't - travel abroad.  

Second, most people don't know where their birth certificates are and many of those people who would need birth certificates the most would be married women - because their current IDs usually bear their husbands' surnames, and birth certificates are required to provide their maiden names.  It would also require converts to Islam, not so coincidentally, to show their birth certificates with their original names, because many converts to Islam, such as basketball players Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (formerly Lewis Alcindor) and Muhammad al-Raouf (formerly Chris Jackson), adopt Arabic names upon their conversions.  

Third,  it is totally unnecessary to remove non-citizens from the voter rolls.  There are none.  Migrants and residents who are not eligible to vote are not going to waste their time registering.  Especially when it's illegal.

These changes to voting laws in the United States will likely not become law any time soon, because it still has to clear the Senate, where Democrats can use procedural measures to block it.  One of the first senators, if not the first senator, to oppose the bill, is a Republican - Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who called the bill "federal overreach."  The Constitution, of course, gives the states the rights and responsibilities of holding elections to prevent the very sort of federal intervention this bill threatens to implement.  But when did constitutional violations ever stop MAGA before?

Oh yeah, even if the Senate does block it like it did in 2025, Trump is already prepared to counteract that.  He plans to issue an executive order requiring voter photo ID, and there have been indications that he plans to send ICE to polling places for the 2026 midterms, particularly in the fifteen states he and MAGA have identified as trouble for their movement. 

This plan to suppress may backfire, because Democratic women are more likely to get passports now. You know who likely don't have passports? MAGA Republicans! They think they don't need passports because they don't need to leave the U.S. because "this is the greatest country in the world!" Yeah? How many countries have they been to in order to make that determination?  

Oh yeah, it would also restrict if not completely eliminate voting by mail in addition to banning registering by mail, and MAGA Republicans are more likely to use the mails as well. 

Even if the bill doesn't reach Trump's desk and he tries to issue an executive order, necessitating a court battle, the groundswell of voters ready to vote MAGA Republicans out of office is likely to be so large that Democrats could win a landslide creating impregnable majorities both houses of Congress.  At that point, Attorney General Pam Bondi - who already tried and failed to blackmail Minnesota Governor Tim Walz into surrendering state voter registration data as a prerequisite for getting ICE out of his state - will send authorities to state capitals like Trenton to collect voter registration data.  At which point, maybe Governor Sherrill will finally realize that it's time for my home state of New Jersey to leave the Union.