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Senate Democrats have panned the GOP’s push for voter ID legislation as akin to segregationist laws from the Deep South, but the architect of the bill in the Senate says their arguments are detached from reality.
“It’s paranoid fantasy,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told Fox News Digital. “These are absurd arguments. They should be ashamed to make them.”
Lee was responding to comments from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who has doubled down on his claim that the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act is “Jim Crow 2.0.”
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The bill, which passed the House last week and has been introduced and championed by Lee in the Senate, would require photo ID to vote in federal elections, proof of citizenship to register and would mandate that states keep voter rolls clear of ineligible voters.
Schumer and his caucus plan to block the bill, arguing that it is a tool of voter suppression that would disproportionately harm poorer Americans and minority groups.
But Lee argued that providing identification or proof of citizenship is routine in everyday life — whether undergoing a background check to buy a firearm or filling out tax forms when starting a new job.
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“By their logic, it’s Jim Crow to require somebody to establish citizenship before taking a job with a new employer, and that’s insane,” Lee said.
“And so then they argue here, well, voting is so fundamental, and we have constitutional protections protecting our right to vote,” he continued. “Well, we’ve got constitutional protections protecting our right to bear arms, and yet that doesn’t cause us to dispense with proving who you are and your eligibility to buy a gun. This has just been insane.”
Without Democratic support, however, the pathway to sending the legislation to President Donald Trump’s desk is complicated.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has vowed to bring the SAVE America Act to the floor, and Republicans have the votes to move it through its first key procedural hurdle. From there, Democrats can block it with the 60-vote filibuster, which Lee often refers to as the “zombie” filibuster.
Eliminating the filibuster is out of the question for several of Lee’s colleagues, but Republicans are warming to reinstating a talking, or standing, filibuster, which would require Senate Democrats to make their case against the bill on the floor over hours of debate.
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Trump has already suggested he would issue an executive order if the legislation fails, which Lee declined to speculate on without first knowing what exactly would be done.
But he noted that it was all the more reason to pass the SAVE America Act, given the ever-swinging political pendulum in Washington, D.C.
“It’s still really critically important that we pass this law, because let’s assume that he issued such an order, and that it does most or all of what we needed to do here, that gives us protection for the moment, to whatever degree he’s able to do that through an executive action,” Lee said. “But we need something that can last longer than he’s in office.”