Action 54 – Golden and the SAVE Act
Background: Reducing the number of voters has been a longstanding priority of the Republican Party. Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation (remember them? Project 2025?) said this in a speech in 1980: “I don't want everybody to vote... As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” (1) They’ve been working on voter suppression ever since. (2)
This is the real impetus behind the SAVE act. It has nothing to do with the infinitesimal chance that a non-citizen will vote, which is already illegal. It has everything to do with reducing the number of ordinary American citizens who vote, and thus reduce our ability to have the elected officials and policies that we prefer. Policies that benefit us, and not the billionaires.
But there’s more. This bill furthers the far right, Christian Nationalist view of the proper role of women in society. It would require documentation, such as a passport or birth certificate matching your current legal name to allow a person to register to vote. This requirement would fall especially hard on women. (3) One estimate is 79% of women take their husband’s last name upon marriage, and it’s not the name on their birth certificate. Depending on the rules in the state where and when the marriage took place, there may be no legal documentation of the name change, so she might not be able to prove her identity, and thus denied the right to vote, even when she has voted without interruption for decades.
The SAVE act, HR 22, has been re-introduced to the House and referred to the Committee on House Administration. There are 83 co-sponsors, all Republican. Jared Golden voted FOR the SAVE act in the prior legislative session, probably because he wasn’t able or willing to analyze the “fine print”. His staff has so far been unable to tell us how he intends to vote this time. In conversations, they seem to be whitewashing the problems with the current bill, saying there are “alternate ways” people can prove citizenship, and asking in a dismissive way if we are getting our information from Indivisible. We’ve asked for their analysis of the bill. (Not received to date. See Reference (4) under Extra Credit about why their touted “failsafe” provisions will, in fact, fail in many states.)
Action: It’s impossible to exaggerate the need for contacting Representative Golden on this issue. Ask him to READ REFERENCE (4) (offer to send it to his staff). Also contact the (few) Democratic members of the Committee on House Administration and ask that they do their best to kill the bill in committee.
Contact:
Jared Golden DC: 202 225 6306 Bangor: 207 249 7400 https://golden.house.gov/contact
Democratic members of Committee: Joe Morelle, Terri Sewell, Norma Torres, Julie Johnson
https://cha.house.gov/members https://cha.house.gov/contact
Urgency: No hearing date has been set as of this writing. Here is where you can keep track of the bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/22 and also send comments where it says “Give Feedback on this bill – Contact your Member”
Extra Credit:
(1)https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10270696-i-don-t-want-everybody-to-vote-as-a-matter-of
(2)https://progressive.org/magazine/smoking-gun-voter-suppression/