House GOP Hardliners Threaten Government Shutdown Over Baseless Illegal Voters Bill

A right-wing group known as the Freedom Caucus says Republicans should insist on the bill when Congress returns in September.

A group of hardline House Republican conservatives and libertarians named their price Monday for keeping the government open past Sept. 30: passage of a bill against illegal voting that most experts say isn’t needed.

The government’s day-to-day operations — most federal agencies and the programs they provide, aside from Social Security and Medicare — are funded through Sept. 30. But to keep the government open past that date and past the general election on Nov. 5 will require a temporary spending bill to be passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, a so-called continuing resolution.

“Furthermore, the Continuing Resolution should include the [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility] Act — as called for by President Trump — to prevent non-citizens from voting to preserve free and fair elections in light of the millions of illegal aliens imported by the Biden-Harris administration over the last four years,” the House Freedom Caucus said in a social media post.

The bill is ostensibly aimed at preventing undocumented immigrants from voting in federal elections, something already illegal and, according to election experts, so exceedingly rare as to not be an issue.

But the bill has appeared to be a pet project of the Trump campaign as a way to put Democrats on the spot ahead of the election about the number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border in recent years. The House already passed the bill in July, with five Democrats joining with Republicans. Senate Democrats have shown no willingness to bring the bill up there.