House Republican schemes to deprive millions of women of voting rights (original) (raw)
Supporters and volunteers of DNC chair candidate Ken Martin cheer outside of the ballroom in the hours prior to the votes for positions at the Democratic National Committee Winter Meeting at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, Saturday, February 1, 2025. | Rod Lamkey Jr./AP
WASHINGTON—A prominent member of the hard right House “Freedom Caucus,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, plans to deprive millions of women of their rights to vote, a prominent member of the Progressive Democrats of America says.
Roy is pushing a bill, HR22, the SAVE Act, which PDA member Mickey Leader warned could cut female voter turnout by 30%.
The SAVE Act as a target the progressives could take on and defeat, using the methods the session discussed, said Leader and Mike Fox, PDA’s deputy executive director who chaired the February 6 zoom session of 250-plus people.
The act’s restriction that knocks out women is simple, Leader said. It requires anyone showing up to vote to bring identification with a name identical to the one they used when first registering.
“If your voter registration says. ‘Mickey Liskin,’ and the driver’s license you present” to pick up a ballot “says ‘Mickey Leader,’ you’re disqualified,” she warned. “Thirty percent of women will be knocked out on the spot” because they never re-registered under their current names.
That’s not the only roadblock to registration, Fox added. “They’ll take military IDs” as proof, he said. “But you need your service record, too. How many people carry their service record around with them?”
“The other ID they’ll accept is your passport,” but it had better be current. “Find a way to get a new passport,” Fox said. People “don’t have time to research and get a passport” when they’re approaching the polls, Leader replied.
The non-partisan Campaign Accountability Center HR22 would restrict voter IDs and enact other curbs.
The center said more than 21 million people could not provide the extra documents the SAVE Act mandates when they register to vote. People of color, married people who have changed their names, as well as young and elderly people “are more likely to have difficulty in accessing these documents.”
Normal drivers’ licenses wouldn’t be enough ID. “Enhanced” licenses, available now in only five states, would qualify.
The SAVE Act also bans mail and online voter registration. Combined, 18 million people used those ways to register in 2022. Helping someone else to register would be a felony, punishable by five years in prison. And the SAVE Act “would mandate frequent voter purges,” which are also unfair to women and people of color, the center adds.
Preserving the right to vote for women is important. For decades, women’s turnout has exceeded men’s turnout—and they vote more progressively. In the 2020 presidential race, exit polls show the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, the first African-American and Asian-American woman to hold the nation’s #2 job, beat the Republican nominee, convicted felon and misogynist Donald Trump 53%-43% among women. But Trump beat Harris 55%-45% among men and won the election.
The threat to women’s voting rights came after a discussion of recent judicial wins, notably a judge’s postponement of Trump’s plan to force mobs of federal workers to quit.
Responding to an emergency lawsuit by the Government Employees (AFGE), AFSCME and other unions, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole in Boston put a hold on the president’s plan, pending a February 10 hearing on its legality.
Faced with an original deadline of midnight, February 6, and the threat of being fired if they didn’t retire, 60,000 workers nationally took the proffered “buyout” Trump’s minions promised. But that buyout isn’t guaranteed.
The Trumpites’ emails dangling the bait said the workers would leave at the end of February and be paid through the end of this fiscal year on September 30. Small print in the Trump e-mails added that if the government shuts down in mid-March when money runs out, “buyout” recipients would be furloughed without that promised pay. So would the workers they left behind.
“We are pleased the court temporarily paused this deadline while arguments are heard about the legality of the deferred resignation program,” said AFGE President Everett Kelley. “We continue to believe this program violates the law, and we will continue to aggressively defend our members’ rights.”
“This is a great first step,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders said. “We all depend on federal workers to keep our communities safe, healthy and strong, and politics should never get between them and the essential services they provide. They deserve to be treated with respect for their public service. We look forward to presenting our full case in the days to come.”
PDA’s main business was ways and means of pressuring lawmakers to resist Trump all the time. That’s not happening now. Fox noted significant numbers of Senate Democrats, in addition to all the Republicans, voted for most of the president’s Cabinet nominees.
Other positive signs for progressives came from the prior week’s Democratic National Committee elections, and from the massive rallies against Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk and particularly Musk’s invasion of federal offices. Musk now dangles Trump like a puppet.
“There was a huge crowd at the Treasury Department,” said Fox, to protest what may be the worst of Musk’s coup against democracy—the wholesale turnover of personal and financial information of millions of people to the multibillionaire and the 22-year-olds on his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team. A federal judge has since curbed the potential of that privacy invasion.
“I heard senators and representatives there using Bernie’s language,” said Fox, referring to Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., a self-described Socialist, and its leading supporter of workers. “When Chris Murphy,” D-Conn., “starts talking about the billionaire class, well, that’s a change for him.”
Fox also described the new party chair, Ken Martin of Minnesota, as “the most progressive chair I’ve seen in years.” Another PDA caller pointed out that David Hogg, who rose to national prominence as co-founder of the student-led—and politically successful—March For Our Lives following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas School gun massacre in Florida seven years ago, is now a DNC vice chair.
Laid out a definite plan
As for ways to push lawmakers to do whatever they can to block Trump, the PDA speakers laid out a detailed plan. One key point is “spending time talking to voters” face-to-face, not just with leafletting and phone banking. That’s the top way to counter the pervasive rightward tilt of social media, Fox said.
A second key is to emphasize the positive, including positive policy alternatives. That’s a point Sanders has made ever since Kamala Harris lost to Trump.
“The more negative stuff we hear” on TV, social media, talk radio and elsewhere, “the worse we feel,” Fox explained. “And that’s what they want,” he said of the right-wingers Trump, Musk and their followers in politics and the corporate class.
“We’re playing into their goal if we try to follow all of the shitstorm they’re throwing out. Focus on a few things” and push them—battling the negativity, promoting positive alternatives, or both—he urged.
Progressives can also take advantage of three special elections for vacant U.S. House seats, participants said: Two in Florida and another in upstate New York, all previously Republican held. Including those three, the GOP has a 220-215 majority. The Floridians vote on April 1. New York’s county chairs for each party choose their nominees.
Progressives seek all three, with Hogg’s March For Our Lives group backing dairy farmer Blake Gendebien, the sole Democrat, in the New York’s 21st district, which reaches from Watertown in the far north to Saratoga County in the east.
Meanwhile, “call your senators,” Fox explained. They have more leeway to block Republican brainstorms, even if Democrats trail, 53-47. Say “you’ve let enough radical right people” into running the government. “Enough is enough.”
Progressive lawmakers actually took a baby step towards that goal the night before the PDA session, They waged an all-night filibuster against one of the most radical of Trump’s picks, Russell Vought, a key author of Trump’s infamous “platform,” Project 2025, to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, a post second in power only to the presidency itself.
Vought believes in “impounding congressionally appropriated funds” and “making the legislature all but obsolete,” MSNBC analyst Hayes Brown said on February 6. The Senate broke the filibuster and confirmed him on a party-line vote.
That demand to senators to hold their stands brought up another problem: Timidity. One questioner raised that by citing remarks of Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., to the big crowd at the Treasury building three days before. Should PDA members, he asked, concentrate on pressuring senators who have extra clout?
“If you are a constituent, yes,” definitely call them, Fox said. Calls, more than emails, make a lasting impression. “If you’re not, call them after hours and leave a message. They log it in.”
His other ways of influencing lawmakers included running for party office on the local level, since local committee slots often go unfilled—and progressives’ votes can make a difference—and writing op-eds to local papers. “And be loud about it.”
One final way to put pressure on lawmakers came up in the chat box, which quickly filled with more than 200 messages: Join the grassroots coalition that put together the mass protests in cities from coast to coast against Trump on a wide range of issues. Its address is www.buildtheresistance.org/50501.
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