House GOP Poised To Force Shutdown Over Non-Citizen Voting, Teeing Up Their 2024 Election Denial Message

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is prepared to take his duties — as Donald Trump’s designated spokesman/guy using Congress to attempt to ensure the former president gets back in the White House whether he wins the election or not — all the way to the brink of a government shutdown.

As Punchbowl and others have been reporting this week, it appears Johnson is on board with a plan that’s been pushed by the more aggressive MAGA Republicans in his conference, such as Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), and was recently backed by Trump himself: linking the passage of a redundant bill that would outlaw something that’s already illegal to any potential government funding bill the House passes to avoid a shutdown at the end of the month.

The redundant piece of legislation is the SAVE Act, which would require that anyone registering to vote in a federal election provide proof of citizenship, a kind of supercharged version of the Republican-pushed voter ID laws of yore. That the law, if passed, would amount to a new voter suppression effort becomes clear when you consider that it is, of course, already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. It is punished so severely in the U.S. that those who are convicted of trying to vote as non-citizens can face deportation.

But Trump and Johnson have been hyping the SAVE Act for months. The two held a Mar-a-Lago press conference in the spring to introduce the legislation. While it’s against the law for non-citizens to vote in federal elections due to the National Voter Registration Act of 1996, states also have measures in place to guard against non-citizen voting in federal, state and nearly all local elections.

Around the time that Johnson and Trump held their big press conference, TPM began covering this topic as one of many messaging layers of a MAGA Big Lie 2.0 that were being soft launched by Republicans as November draws closer. In recent weeks, other news outlets have also caught on, covering Republicans’ non-citizen voting hysteria as an effort to preemptively sow doubt in the upcoming presidential election.

Since President Biden dropped out and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the motivation behind Trump and his allies’ efforts to stoke unsubstantiated fears about non-citizen voting in the fall has only become more pellucid. As TPM has reported, red state governors around the U.S. have begun doing the messaging work for the Trump campaign, making a big performance out of announcing efforts to combat non-citizen voting (again, already illegal) and to clear their voter rolls of registered non-citizens (voter roll maintenance is a standard practice for election officials in every state leading up to a big presidential election). It’s all part of a broader pattern we’ve seen play out repeatedly in recent years: Republicans are using their positions of power at the state level and in Congress to sound off with a variation on the theme of “voter fraud,” giving Trump a myth to point to if he loses in the fall.

House Republicans’ latest effort to cosplay as lawmakers while using their House majority to push the Trump campaign’s talking points into the news cycle might be the most damaging version of this election denialism prep we’ve seen thus far.

Roy and other members of the House Freedom Caucus have been pushing Johnson to attach their (again, redundant) proof-of-citizenship voting bill to a stopgap bill that would keep the government funded into 2025. The SAVE Act is obviously a non-starter for Democrats in the Senate, and most Democrats in the House, and attaching it to a continuing resolution that would kick funding fights to next term risks a government shutdown just before the November election, which would not be politically advantageous for Johnson.

But that’s what Trump wants.

“I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it,” Trump said on the “Monica Crowley Show” last week. “It should be in the bill. And if it’s not in the bill, you want to close it up. … So I’m not there but, you know, I have influence.”

Johnson giving into his far-right flank’s demands here helps Trump in two ways: it allows Trump and his allies to blame a pre-election shutdown on Democrats, and it also won’t pass, setting Trump up to declare that Democrats blocked Republicans from trying to address a (non-existent) problem that lost him the election. Or so, he will say.