Trump Wants The Mailman To Steal Your Vote
Talk about ballot harvesting...
On Wednesday morning, the president blew up a bipartisan housing bill that had just sailed through both houses of Congress.
“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” he brayed on social medial. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Trump is desperate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would impose a massive overhaul of state voting procedures, mandating proof of citizenship to register, photo ID at the polls, and the creation a national registry of “eligible” voters. And so, for the second time in a week, he cut the legs out from under congressional Republicans, particularly Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who painstakingly negotiated a deal to confirm a new Director of National Intelligence and get the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorized, only to have Trump drop a bomb in it by demanding to add his vote suppression bill to the package.
Passing the SAVE America would require nuking the filibuster, which Republicans don’t have the votes for, to bring a vote suppression bill that almost certainly cannot get 50 votes. On Wednesday, Trump showed up for a lunch with Senate Republicans where he screamed at them and called them names — which might work with this lot of spineless chuds, you never know.
“I don’t know why you’re holding a bill that’s ready for signature hostage over a bill that will never pass this Congress,” Senator Thom Tillis grumbled, after Trump spiked the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which the GOP had been touting as a major boost to home buyers.
Trump has grown increasingly manic as his plan to construct a mass disenfranchisement machine by executive fiat has been dropkicked by the courts. As I wrote yesterday at Public Notice, the administration has a three-pronged scheme bone the midterms: 1) seize state voter lists; 2) hack into Social Security and turn it into a bulk voter-screening database to dump the stolen electoral rolls into; and 3) conscript the Post Office to refuse mail ballot delivery to anyone who doesn’t show up on their list.
