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.
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.