GOP Prepares Scapegoat in Case Trump Loses

Without it, they might force a government shutdown

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

It’s a story we’ve all heard before: The House Freedom Caucus is using the threat of a government shutdown to force their fellow lawmakers to make concessions to their legislative demands. But this script comes with a couple new details: The threatened shutdown would come in the final weeks of the election cycle, potentially upending the campaign. Beyond that, one of the caucus’s demands is to establish a pretext to deny the election results if Donald Trump loses.

In a statement aimed squarely at House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday, the Freedom Caucus declared that if all 12 appropriations bills are not passed on time, Congress should pass a continuing resolution to fund the government all the way into the next year to avoid a “lame duck omnibus that preserves Democrat spending and policies well into the next administration.”

All quite typical so far. But if you read to the end you will find this paragraph: 

Furthermore, the Continuing Resolution should include the SAVE 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 SAVE Act might sound familiar to regular readers. We dug into it in May when Republicans, flanked by white nationalist fellow traveler and former Trump administration staffer Stephen Miller, declared that millions of migrants pose a risk to the sanctity of the electoral process. Speaker Johnson himself claimed, without evidence, that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable.”

If enacted, the SAVE Act would require documented proof of citizenship to vote, force states to purge voter rolls, and inflict punishments on any individual caught registering someone to vote who hasn’t met the new documentary requirements. But Johnson’s claim gave away the true goal of the legislation.

While the speaker and others describe the bill as a way to get “tough” on illegal voting by undocumented immigrants, the primary purpose of the SAVE Act has less to do with policy than power. If it passes, it could have a chilling effect on both would-be voters and election officials, advantaging Republicans. If it doesn’t pass, those same Republicans get to play up the conspiracy that Democrats allowed undocumented migrants to vote in the election. 

Beyond that, it’s a trap bill intended to catch vulnerable Democrats who want to avoid being seen as “weak” on border security. This anxiety has already motivated some of these Dems to sign on to other cynical Republican messaging bills. Shortly before the August recess began, the House voted to condemn Vice President Kamala Harris for inaction on securing the border.¹ Six Democrats running in frontline districts voted in favor of the GOP resolution, including:

• Henry Cuellar (Texas)

• Reps. Yadira Caraveo (Colo.)

• Don Davis (N.C.)

• Mary Peltola (Alaska)

• Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.) 

• Jared Golden (Maine)

Four of those members (Cuellar, Davis, Golden, and Gluesenkamp Perez) also voted for the SAVE Act. In addition, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) also backed the bill.

While it could make sense for more conservative Democrats to vote with Republicans occasionally for the sake of their own policy preferences, it’s important to reiterate that the SAVE Act is designed to solve a problem that does not exist. Beside the obvious point that it is already illegal for undocumented immigrants to vote, there is also no evidence that undocumented immigrants are casting fraudulent votes. People assigned to study the issue by Republicans themselves have found that illegal voting of this kind simply isn’t happening, Speaker Johnson’s hunch notwithstanding.

For example, Trump appointed a commission in 2017 to find evidence of voting by undocumented immigrants in 2016. (During his first term, Trump claimed anywhere from three to five million illegal votes were cast to deprive him of a popular vote victory.) The commission disbanded without finding any evidence of these illegal votes. 

Another Republican-led audit in Georgia prior to the 2022 midterm elections found that while 1,634 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote in the state since 1997, not one was able to do so. Officials caught and prevented every single attempt.

If undocumented immigrants aren’t actually threatening the integrity of American elections, why keep going after them? The answer is that they are all too easy to frame for “election theft” should things not go Trump’s way this November. As Johnson said in May, “We don't have that number [of undocumented immigrants voting in American elections]. This legislation will allow us to do exactly that.” Unlike voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic, who were baselessly accused of turning the 2020 election, undocumented immigrants are a largely faceless bogeyman without the legal recourse to force retractions and seek financial compensation for defamation. Right-wing politicians and pundits can attack them however they like with impunity. 

That’s why the Freedom Caucus is making this demand now: They’ve taken their cues from Trump. They see the strategic value of using migrants as a scapegoat if the election doesn’t go their way. 

Using the budget process to achieve this goal may be a new approach. But the tactic itself is familiar. For the past decade and a half, the prospect of either a full or a partial government shutdown—often thanks to the Freedom Caucus and their right-wing allies in the House and Senate—has been a regular part of the congressional calendar. The government has been forced to close on several occasions, including at the end of 2018, which saw the longest shutdown in U.S. history.

Right-wingers outside the Capitol support the move, as well. Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker, Trump himself, and others have all backed the Freedom Caucus’s play. The speaker of the House wholeheartedly backs the bill, too. The same day the Freedom Caucus made their demand, he published an op-ed at Fox News outlining the SAVE Act and why he wants it to become law.

And that’s the end of that chapter 

Has our cultural stasis finally broken, and if so, how closely is it connected with the rapidly changing political moment? It’s an interesting question that Ryan Broderick posed Monday at GQ.

Broderick’s smart piece brings together things we don’t necessarily associate with each other. But if you reflect on your favorite trends, styles, music, and more, you may find natural connections to different presidential administrations.²

As Broderick writes:

Mapping pop culture trends onto US political administrations is not an exact science. It's a game of vibes. But since the advent of television, there have been clear cycles of American culture that roughly line up with the president in charge at the time.

The Reagan years gave birth to violent Hollywood musclemen, gaudy new-wave fashion, sleek synth pop, and nihilistic (and positive) hardcore punk. The Clinton years birthed the apathy of grunge, the ironic detachment associated with Gen X, and pop-culture meta-humor crammed into Tarantino movies and The Simpsons. By the 2000s, the horror of 9/11 and Bush's subsequent War on Terror brought with it the trashy distractions of reality TV, paranoia-infected action movies, recession-era bloggers, and the confused angst of nu-metal and mall emo. All of which eventually cooled and matured into the deranged corporate optimism of the Obama years. The hipsters got jobs and the sellout ruled supreme. Listicles and YouTube pop music littered an Ellen Show–dominated media ecosystem of brand-safe flash-mob digital nothingness. The Trump years were powered by celebrity gossip, violent protests, and unending Twitter discourse.

It’s a bit early to sum up the Biden years. We have five more months of Joe's America—nearly half a year where literally anything could happen, including, at the extreme end, the undermining of US democracy and all-out war in the Middle East. Plus, very little has happened, culturally speaking. One could argue that the defining characteristic of Biden's administration has been stasis, if not outright stagnation. Insurrections that thankfully never succeeded. A million new vibes that failed to shift. Hyped-up tech bubbles that burst on arrival.

Read the whole thing.

1. Once it became clear she was going to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

2. I associate skinny jeans and fast fashion with the Obama administration. Perhaps that’s why I rank him close to the bottom.