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When House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared at Mar-a-Lago on Friday alongside Donald Trump, it was widely understood that both men had something to gain. The beleaguered GOP congressional leader, for example, is facing intensifying criticism from his far-right flank — including a motion-to-vacate effort launched by one of his most radical members — and receiving the former president’s imprimatur will likely give the Louisianan a boost.
As for the presumptive Republican nominee, Friday’s meeting helped his ego — Trump appears to like it when officials make the trip to Florida to kiss his ring — and his conspiracy theories. A Politico report noted last week that the former president benefits from having “the country’s highest-ranking Republican ... lend credence to his voting concerns.”
It was against this backdrop that NBC News reported:
Former President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson pitched new legislation to crack down on noncitizen voting on Friday, despite the fact the practice is already illegal and occurs rarely. Johnson said House Republicans would introduce a bill to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, speaking at Mar-a-Lago next to Trump as he seeks to fend off threats from his right flank.
For now, let’s put aside the fact that it’s utterly ridiculous for two election deniers to pretend they’re deeply concerned with the integrity of elections. Instead, let’s emphasize three of the glaring problems with the Trump/Johnson pitch.
The first is that the Republican leaders are pushing a solution to a problem that does not exist. There are literally zero locations in the United States where non-citizens can vote in federal and/or state elections. For that matter, you’re more likely to find Americans struck by lightning than non-Americans trying to cast ballots.
As NBC News’ report added, “Many have investigated noncitizen voting and found little evidence of it.”
The Brennan Center found just 30 suspected noncitizen votes amid 23.5 million votes in 2016, suggesting that suspected noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001% of votes cast. Trump’s own election integrity commission disbanded without releasing evidence of voter fraud, even though he’d claimed 3 million undocumented immigrants had voted in 2016 costing him the popular vote.
The second problem is the redundancy. “It seems like common sense, I’m sure all of us would agree that we only want U.S. citizens to vote in U.S. elections,” the House speaker told reporters on Friday.
But what he neglected to mention is that because this is “common sense,” it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in U.S. elections. There’s simply no point in passing a federal law to prohibit something that’s already prohibited under federal law.
All of which leads to the third problem: the motivation behind the GOP leaders’ push.
Johnson said Friday that a recent influx of immigrants is “one of their designs” that Democratic officials created “because they want to turn these people into voters.” That’s absurd for all sorts of reasons, including the years-long process in which some of these immigrants might be able to become citizens.
As a Washington Post analysis concluded last week, “As generally formulated, the ‘great replacement theory’ posits that the intent is to grant these new arrivals citizenship, allowing them to vote legally. But that takes too long to be useful for November, so here we are. Is all of this entirely cynical, simply a political ploy? It’s hard to see how it might not be.”