Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) defended Democrats’ opposition to the SAVE Act, calling it a “modern poll tax,” in an interview on NewsNation’s “The Hill Sunday.”
“The devil in that bill is in the details, and the SAVE Act puts barriers on American citizens voting, and actually is a modern poll tax,” she instructed host Chris Stirewalt on Sunday.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has remained adamant in his help for pairing a seamless decision with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to fund the federal government.
Democrats and the White Home have stated they’ll block the laws, noting that noncitizen voting is already unlawful and exceedingly uncommon and that the invoice may unduly burden eligible voters.
McClellan famous that the one strategies to show citizenship, underneath the SAVE Act, “just happen to be the ones that cost money.”
“You won’t be able to use your state driver’s license,” she stated, including that the simplest choice “you could use is a passport. It costs money. A lot of Americans don’t have passports.”
McClellan additional famous that it may be troublesome for some individuals to acquire their beginning certificates, which might be essential to show citizenship, and people who have modified their names – for marriage or different causes – usually wrestle to “reconcile that in order to prove their citizenship.”
McClellan stated the difficulty is private, invoking her household’s historical past with the ballot tax.
“Look, I took my oath of office on the Bible in which my father kept his poll tax receipt,” she stated. “I am not voting for a modern poll tax just so that they can say they’ve done something to keep noncitizen voters from doing something that is already illegal, punishable by up to five years in federal prison, and that there’s very little evidence, is a widespread problem.”
NewsNation is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which additionally owns The Hill.
