The Week Ahead

February 16, 2025

Who you vote for is a political choice. Whether a fully eligible citizen can vote isn’t about politics, it’s about your fundamental rights as an American. For decades now, the Republican party’s trajectory has involved making it more difficult for eligible people to vote—people they suspect won’t be voting for them—using a variety of methods, like making it harder to register, stay registered, vote, and have your vote counted. These forms of voter suppression are often justified with false allegations of voter fraud, allegations we’ve seen Trump take to new levels.

Unfortunately, people who don’t like your politics have been hard at work to make it more difficult for you to vote. Enter the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act.

The SAVE Act

The House version of the SAVE Act, H.R. 22, which Republicans have pledged to put on a fast track to approval, carries this innocuous sounding summary: “To amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require proof of United States citizenship to register an individual to vote in elections for Federal office, and for other purposes.” It has 81 sponsors. They are all Republicans. You can read the full text of the bill here.

Here are some of the things the bill does:

• To register to vote, re-register, or make a change of address, people would have to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other proof-of-citizenship documents. (Anyone checked to see how long it takes to get a passport these days, with federal employees being fired left and right?) The Brennan Center notes that “tens of millions of Americans register or re-register between every federal election.”

• Women in particular would be heavily impacted. As many as 69 million women who’ve taken their husband’s last name don’t have a birth certificate that matches their legal name. Unless they have a passport, which is expensive, these women may be unable to vote.

• Registering to vote by mail and online would no longer be possible because voters must show their citizenship documents “in person” to register. Large registration drives at churches and PTA meetings would become difficult, if not impossible, to conduct.

• The bill’s pretend mechanism to permit voters who lack citizenship documents to register is a farce. The bill purports to let them demonstrate citizenship with “other evidence” and a sworn affidavit. But that provision is vague, and because the bill also makes it a crime for election officials to register an applicant who doesn’t present sufficient proof, it’s easy to see how meaningless that provision is.

A study done by civil society groups surveyed Americans about whether they have documents that prove their citizenship, like a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers, at hand. More than 9% of voting age citizens, 21.3 million people, didn’t, for reasons including the documents being lost, destroyed, or stolen, or because the papers were at a family member’s home or in secure storage, for instance, college students whose documents may be in another state with their parents. The report on the study noted that “Convenience matters when it comes to consistent participation in American elections.”

Welcome to Alabama, although even here, the current regime isn’t quite so draconian.

House Republicans have declared that passing the legislation is one of their top priorities for the 119th Congress, even though it would disenfranchise millions of Americans—Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike.

Who you vote for is, again, a political choice. But the ability of millions of Americans to register and vote is about something much more important than politics. It’s about fundamental rights. The SAVE Act is about canceling a, perhaps the, most important, fundamental right for millions of Americans.

Opposing this bill is something that everyone, regardless of party, should be able to get behind. Sure, it’s important that only eligible citizens vote in our elections, but there is strong evidence that that is the case. This is a classic example of using overblown allegations of voter fraud to justify voter suppression. We looked at the issue in this edition of Civil Discourse, where a review of conservative states’ efforts to stop noncitizen voting revealed their efforts were a solution in search of a problem. Sources including the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, NPR, The Guardian, The New York Times, ABC News, PBS, The Brennan Center, and nonpartisan outlet Roll Call have all debunked the myth that noncitizens vote in significant numbers—the small amount who do don’t impact the outcome of elections and certainly don’t justify disenfranchising so many eligible American citizen voters. There’s something else at work here, and it’s obvious what it is: voter suppression, keeping people Republicans fear will vote for Democrats from voting at all. Disenfranchising women in massive numbers is the stuff of The Handmaid’s Tale. The time to oppose this bill is now, before it can get further traction.

How do we get the word out about this? Instagram has become a remarkably effective vehicle for spreading the word in a nonpartisan fashion. Glamour Magazine was on it!

MSNBC Host Katie Phang took to TikTok with the Brennan Center’s Wendy Weiser for a longer conversation about the bill you may want to share with friends.

I don’t have any confidence that the guy who tweeted this over the weekend is interested in protecting my right to vote.

We usually devote The Week Ahead edition of the newsletter to upcoming legal and political events, but with the House GOP prioritizing this bill, it feels important to prioritize this information. But this is Trump 2.0, and there is obviously a lot going on. Here are a few flags for some of the items we’ll be following this week:

• Eric Adams Case: Motion to Dismiss. Following the Thursday night massacre, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has filed the government’s motion to dismiss the bribery case against New York City’s mayor. That motion is now pending in front of Federal District Judge Dale Ho. The government needs leave of court to dismiss its case, but the court may hold a hearing into the matter, which could get very interesting. If Congress is serious about investigating the politicization of the Justice Department, this would be a good time to take sworn testimony on the matter.

• Firings in the Federal Workforce Accelerate. Here’s just one example of how bad Elon Musk’s decisions are for the rest of us. The cuts at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) include layoffs of all fellows and post-doc staff at the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS). These folks are the most elite group of disease detectives in the world. EIS has trained over 4,000 epidemiologists who have investigated and responded to a wide range of public health challenges and emergencies. Even if this group is restored years down the road, at least this year, there will be no young scientists training with leaders in the field and carrying forward their expertise. Apparently, the government is no longer worried about epidemics, even though there’s a measles outbreak in Texas. A public health academic told me, “This administration’s actions will destroy one of the best units the U.S. government has ever had.” The EIS website at CDC is still up for now if you want to learn more about their work. And, looking at this issue from another direction, the Alt National Park account on Bluesky shared this.

• Whither the First Amendment? The White House has continued to ban the highly regarded Associated Press from press events because they refuse to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. If you can ban a major news source over such a silly issue and get away with it, there’s nothing that prevents you from taking that show on the road. Pretty soon it will be only Fox News and OAN in the Oval Office and on Air Force One. Will we see a lawsuit from the AP this week, challenging the violation of the First Amendment? One can only hope. And perhaps even a show of solidarity from other outlets. The White House Correspondents’ Association, led this year by POLITICO’s Eugene Daniels, has stood up for all members’ First Amendment rights. Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House, Taylor Budowich, made it clear in this post that they are willing to go to war with the press over the ridiculous.

• First Trump Challenge Headed to the Supreme Court. Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris is asking the Court to overrule a Saturday overnight 2-1 decision by the District of Columbia Circuit that prevents Trump from summarily removing Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel. The Solicitor General is asking the Court to vacate that order. After Trump fired him, Dellinger insisted he was entitled to stay in place, and both the district judge and the Court of Appeals agreed he was entitled to a temporary restraining order (TRO) that would keep him in place for 14 days until the court could consider the issues further. The 2-1 split in the Court of Appeals was along the party line of the presidents who appointed the judges, which forces us to consider whether this will be an issue of law or of politics when it hits the Court. If the former, the government’s motion should be denied because TROs are not usually immediately appealable, and the Court should defer until after the judge holds the next hearing, later this month. Then, there will be a better-developed factual record and briefing on the legal issues for the Supreme Court to consider so it can determine whether Dellinger should remain in office while the litigation proceeds. You can read the appellate court’s decision in Dellinger v. Bessent here. All eyes will be on whether the Supreme Court will hear, and if so how it treats the new administration, on this first case to reach the Court, less than a month into Trump 2.0.

• Stacey Abrams and Me in Conversation. Wednesday night, February 19th, at 7:00 E.T., Fair Fight’s Stacey Abrams has asked me to join her for a conversation about democracy, and you’re invited to join us! You’ll need to register in advance—here’s the link.

Here we go for another week of it.

We’re in this together,

Joyce