WASHINGTON — U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson and Donald J. Trump met Friday evening in Palm Beach, Florida, to promote an unreleased bill on foreign voting in federal elections.
The event was also an opportunity to show support for the presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee’s threatened victory over the Republican Party chairman.
Both men argued that strict voting requirements are necessary because of the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
“We have an election problem,” Trump said, sharply criticizing the White House’s approach.
The bill would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, Johnson said. It’s already a requirement under federal law.
“Election integrity is intimately linked to the border, the lack of border security,” Johnson said.
Johnson said the novel rules would also require states to verify that a person registered to vote is a U.S. citizen, something states already do by using federal databases, birth certificates or driver’s licenses.
Johnson said he intends to put the bill to a vote to give Democrats a say.
“The Democrats are going to come out and reveal this,” Johnson said. “We’ll have their response in a moment.”
The elections bill would likely face difficulties in the Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority and the bill needs 60 votes to pass.
The visit to Trump’s golf resort and main residence at Mar-a-Lago came as Johnson struggles to govern with a slim 218-213 majority and fends off attempts by Trump ally and far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to oust him as speaker.
“He’s doing great under difficult circumstances,” Trump said in endorsing Johnson.
Johnson also faces pressure from members of the far-right wing to reauthorize the warrantless surveillance program under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and approve additional aid to Ukraine — two issues that Trump has expressed disapproval of.
“Election integrity is intimately linked to the border, the lack of border security,” Johnson said.
In a statement released by his campaign, Trump said Johnson had agreed to hold “a series of public committee hearings over the next two months” to allow members of Congress to prepare to draft the bill.
As we read in the statement, the hearings will discuss postal voting, general preparations for the 2024 elections and the maintenance of voter lists, with particular emphasis on preventing immigrants who are in the country illegally from registering to vote.
After the news conference, Alex Floyd, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement that Trump and Johnson are “extreme election deniers and serial liars who are hell-bent on endangering our democracy and spreading baseless lies about the 2020 election.”
“The only thing we will accomplish with this sad joint speech is to make it even clearer to the American people that the future of our democracy is at stake in November,” Floyd said.
As he did during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has made fears of immigration a central theme of his bid for the White House in November.
AND Law 1996 already prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections.
However, as a handful of Democratic-run cities have passed laws allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections, Republicans they promoted the narrative that foreigners were involved in election fraud at the federal level and advocated for more restrictive voting rules.
Previous attempt
Last year, Republicans from the House of Representatives launched a similar initiative, where the House Administration Committee overwhelmingly passed a package to overhaul state voting requirements, introducing penalties for states that allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.
The committee chairman, Wisconsin Republican Bryan Steil, said at the time that A 224-page bill contained similar provisions to the voting reform bill that Georgia’s Republican-led legislature passed after Joe Biden won the state in 2020 and sent two Democratic senators to Washington. The Georgia law was widely criticized by Democrats and voting access advocates for adding barriers to voting.
That bill, which failed to pass Congress, would repeal an amendment passed by the D.C. Council in 2022 to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. States like California, Maryland and Vermont have similar laws.
Trump has frequently claimed, without evidence, that enormous numbers of foreigners vote in federal elections.
Researchers have often debunked this. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, conducted an analysis of the electoral proceedings from 2003 to 2023, and 29 cases of non-U.S. citizens voting were found.
Area of agreement
This is not the first time Trump and Johnson have had the same opinion on voting issues.
A constitutional lawyer, Johnson played a key role in defending the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election through legal challenges. The Louisiana Republican led more than 100 House Republicans in amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court in a case challenging the election results in four key battleground states won by President Joe Biden – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit.
Under Trump, Johnson served as Trump’s legal defender during his first impeachment trial in the House of Representatives in 2020, when the former president was charged with obstructing Congress and abuse of power.
