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.
it’s bonkers to me that having ID is not mandatory in the US. do all these rednecks think that SSN is number of the beast or something
in my country, you have to have ID and you have to register mail address with the govt (as an official way of delivering documents but not only) this address is also used to automatically register for voting at closest pooling station which is in general less than 1km away in cities and there’s one within every village 500 or so or more. for actual voting most of people bring ID, but driving license, passport or official govt app with digital ID is also allowed
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.
The real problem isn’t convincing people they should get an ID. The problem is that there is no existing federal ID standard outside a passport, and getting a passport takes a significant amount of time and money. In most states, you do have to have an ID to at least register to vote, and in many you have to show ID when voting, it’s just that the requirements for ID vary from state to state and, again, there’s no federal standard. The Republicans screaming for voter ID laws know all this, but they refuse to do anything to fix it first. Make of that what you will.
On top of all that, there is zero evidence that we have a problem with non-citizens trying to vote. It just doesn’t happen. Why would they? What would they possibly have to gain by taking the risk of being caught?
i get what is going on and what republicans are trying to achieve with that, it’s just baffling to me that there’s no federal ID standard. would all/majority of states need to approve of it separately or something like this?
Nah, you only need that level of approval for a constitutional amendment. Something like this just needs to get through congress.
To be fair, I should amend my earlier statement to say that there kinda-sorta is a federal standard. It just isn’t very good. In 2005, congress passed the Real ID act, which was intended to allow state-issued IDs to include a special rider that indicates it is approved at the federal level. The implementation of this law has been pushed back several times, but it goes into effect sometime next year, at which point it will not be possible to board an airplane in the US without a passport or some other Real ID-compliant form of ID.
It sounds great on the surface, but the downside is that the cost of implementing these IDs is being passed on to the individuals, and it requires a bunch of extra documentation. So getting a Real ID is nearly as expensive and difficult as getting a US passport. But it’s less useful because it’s only recognized inside the US. So if they require one to vote, that’s yet another way to disenfranchise the poor.
What we should be doing is issuing passports to anyone that qualifies for free. But doing that would require a huge expansion of the state department because they can barely keep up with the current demand as it is.