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.
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.