Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) stressed the need to have the Democratic Party deal with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, arguing his own party needs to “call the bluff of Democrats.”
The SAVE Act would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require people to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote. Roy, who sponsored this bill, argued that Vice President Kamala Harris and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) want “nothing to do” with it because they don’t care about voters becoming citizens before voting.
“But what viewers probably don’t understand is that federal law currently prohibits states from being able to check citizenship when they register voters,” Roy said on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle. “The SAVE Act would fix it. President Trump is correct. He wants to attach it to a funding bill in September. Mike Johnson is correct. We just now need all Republicans to get behind it and jam it down the throats of Democrats who are more interested in perpetuating their scheme of pulling in voters for Democrats than standing up for citizen-only voting.”
The Texas lawmaker also rebuked Democrats for being on “the wrong side” in opposing the bill and said the party is “scared to death” that former President Donald Trump is in support of it. Roy also questioned why Democrats who claim noncitizens are not voting in elections are against the measure and accused his opposing party of being worried noncitizen voting will end.
Last month, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) encouraged attaching the SAVE Act to Congress’s next spending bill to ensure it is debated in the Senate before the 2024 election. He explained that attaching the bill to a spending bill would force Schumer to decide if he wants to risk a government shutdown.
The White House rebuked the SAVE Act in a July statement, arguing it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections and that this bill is “based on easily disproven falsehoods.”
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Republicans have been adamantly at work to increase election integrity ahead of the 2024 elections. On Tuesday, the Bexar County Commissioners Court in Texas voted to approve a plan to hire a company to print and distribute voter registration forms to unregistered county residents, which prompted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to file a lawsuit.
Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) announced that 1.1 million “ineligible” voters were removed from the state’s voter rolls, 457,000 of whom were people who had died and 6,500 of whom were noncitizens. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) also issued an executive order to “protect legal voters and accurate counts” last month, which revealed over 6,300 noncitizens were removed from Virginia’s voter rolls.