WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 2026
...already has a passport: Would some people be deprived of the right to vote under terms of the SAVE (or Save America) Act?
How many people might be so deprived? Who might those people be?
Yesterday afternoon, we said there has been remarkably little energy directed toward the task of trying to answer such questions. That might be because no one ever thought the bill would actually make it through the Senate. Also, it may just be a consequence of "the flooding of the zone," in which news orgs are overwhelmed by the profusion of foolishness which does in fact need to be covered.
We've alleged, you can decide! For today, we thought you might like to see what happened yesterday on The Five, during the ritual interruption and overtalking of Jessica Tarlov, the show's twice-weekly punching bag.
During yesterday's second segment, the five co-hosts pretended to tackle the knotty topic known as the SAVE Act. Eventually, Tarlov tried to explain how the proposed procedures would work.
Even if Tarlov hadn't been interrupted, we aren't sure she could have done it. For amusement purposes only, we direct you to something said by Johnny Joey Jones before the start of Tarlov's effort.
Jones routinely engages in self-pitying reminiscences about the way he grew up in Dalton, Georgia. (Later, he served with great valor as a Marine bomb technician in Afghanistan.) Yesterday, with respect to the kinds of documentation involved in the SAVE Act, he offered this unintentionally comical family portrait:
JONES (3/17/26): I might be the only one here that grew up, like, really far from middle class—maybe not. Grew up poor, had a great life, had food on the table. We also had our birth certificates...
At one time, a certain reminiscence was common within parts of this nation's lower-income world:
We were poor, but we didn't know we were poor.
Recalling the great life he miserably had, Jones had now rewritten that bromide:
We were poor—but we all had our birth certificates!
Based on that reminiscence, Jones went on to reject the idea that people can't assemble the documentation required by the SAVE Act (whatever that documentation might actually turn out to be).
Tarlov then began trying to explain the alleged problems with the proposal. She started off with this:
TARLOV: When you talk about proof of citizenship, that comes one of two ways. First, a passport, which only 50% of Americans have. It costs $165 to get a passport...
From there, she turned to the question of birth certificates. Soon, the tedium became unbearable for her four pro-MAGA co-hosts. Inevitably, the interruptions started, with Master Gutfeld saying this:
TARLOV: Why are you interrupting me?
GUTFELD: Because it's fun!
We doubt that Tarlov could have explained the possible problems with this proposal if she'd been given the full hour. But soon, the MAGA co-hosts were asking her questions like this:
GUTFELD: Do you know somebody who doesn't have an ID? (Sarcastically) Tell me about it!
You've spent years talking about a person who could not get an ID and I've never met one. I've never met one! Why should I believe this now?
PERINO (puzzled): How many people in your life— But how many people in your life don't have a passport?
TARLOV: In my life as an upper middle-class person? I don't even know...
Perino seemed to be puzzled! Doesn't everyone Tarlov knows already have a passport? Does anyone else even count?
Tarlov had already said that 50% of Americans don't have a passport, and that getting one costs money. But so went the cluelessness as the pro-MAGA hosts pretended to be trying to examine a complex policy question.
Might some or many lower-income people be unable to afford getting a passport? Presumably, the answer would be yes—but thoughts of such people were swept away as the interruptions, followed by the inevitable joking, brought the latest imitation of a news discussion to a premature end.
This was yesterday's second segment. In the segment which followed, vampires flew out of the drapes in the manner described this morning.
Talarico's like Ted Bundy, one of the undead said. No, he's more like David Koresh, a second creature opined.
More on that astounding third segment will follow. Under prevailing rules of the Blue American game, you'll see it nowhere else.
Final point: So how would the SAVE Act work? At this site, we still have no real idea!
"How many people might be so deprived? Who might those people be?
ReplyDeleteYesterday afternoon, we said there has been remarkably little energy directed toward the task of trying to answer such questions. "
Somerby pretends that no one has studied this, but there are political experts who have studied who is affected by a variety of voter suppression efforts. They inform candidates and campaigns and they provide testimony to lawsuits about the impact of changes to voting procedures. There is a literature on this and similar voting related topics.
Somerby wrong when he says no one knows the impact of Republican measures like the SAVE Act. There is a reason they wrote the act as they did, because Republicans know these impact too, and they aren't going to enact laws unfavorable to themselves.
The Bipartisan Policy Center and the League of Women Voters have released policy impact statements on the SAVE Act.
The best argument against the SAVE Act is that it is unnecessary because the problem it is designed to address simply does not exist. Handicapping anyone in the face of a nonexistent problem becomes intolerable because it is then a pure denial of someone's right to vote. At that point, it does not matter who is being obstructed, for what reasons, but only that there is no competing benefit to interfering with the franchise at all.
I do not understand why Somerby moans about the lack of a discussion on a Fox show, when Republicans are never going to support a measure that may interfere with their own support, and the courts are never going to allow a measure that has no purpose except to make it harder for women or poor people to vote -- the exact number so inconvenienced does not matter when there is no problem of non-citizen voting to begin with.
Given that there is zero non-citizen voting, it doesn't matter how the SAVE Act actually works -- it is not needed. There is no way for it to improve a situation that does not exist, thus no reason to interfere with current voting at all.
There has been a lot of discussion of this bill. Somerby is a goofball.
DeleteMost people also don’t have a certified birth certificate, which is the only one allowed for ID purposes. They have a ceremonial BC from the hospital.
DeleteTrump, perhaps being excessively literal, thinks the SAVE Act is going to save his presidency by preventing a blue wave. That's why he is pressuring support from Republicans in Congress. I think he would be disappointed if he could understand what the bill actually does.
ReplyDeleteCA has required all drivers to have a real ID, so there is not going to be as big an impact on CA voters. Given that CA is a blue state, I think maybe these SAVE requirements might handicap red state voters more than blue states.Higher educated voters will understand the requirements better than low information voters (who are more likely to be red), so that too may create a bias toward educated people who vote blue. This may not go the way Trump thinks it will.
ReplyDelete"CA has required all drivers to have a real ID, so there is not going to be as big an impact on CA voters."
DeleteDo those REAL ID licenses indicate citizenship status? That's not a given. In some states, REAL ID licenses indicate legal status, but not citizenship. That is, they might indicate that a voter is legally present, but not whether she is a citizen or a legal permanent non-citizen resident. That's enough to put that REAL ID outside the requirements of the act.
You do not need to be a citizen to obtain a DL in CA. The point of ID is to prove that a person is who they say they are. It isn't to confirm any kind of status except the right to drive after having passed a written and driving test showing competence to drive. That people use the DL for other things (such as proof of age for buying alcohol) is secondary to that purpose.
DeleteIf they want to have some sort of voting license, they need to provide a procedure for verifying right to vote. These other forms of ID vary across states. The Republicans seem headed toward some national ID system, which has historically been opposed as part of an authoritarian state. Social Security Administration has opposed a move toward using SS#s as ID for other purposes, for the same reasons. It is only because we have creeping fascism that Republicans are gung ho about, that this is controversial now. Democrats don't want people to be assigned numbers, or tracked using personal data, or compelled to do or not do various things now guaranteed in our bill of rights/Constitution, or be surveilled using personal data such as cell phone numbers and email. We need to decide if we are going to be a free people or whether we are going to allow Big Brother to watch us in the name of pretending to vote for a totalitarian dictator.
The country already decided that in 2024, afraid to say
Delete"FBI Is Buying Data to Track People
DeleteMarch 18, 2026 at 1:29 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard
“The FBI is buying up information that can be used to track people’s movement and location history, Director Kash Patel said during a Senate hearing Wednesday,” Politico reports.
“It is the first confirmation that the agency is actively buying people’s data since former Director Christopher Wray said in 2023 that the FBI had purchased location data in the past but was not doing so at that time.”
Somerby doesn't need to worry about a voting bill that won't affect him, unless he has changed his name at some point. Anything is possible though.
ReplyDeleteSomerby’s obviously hostile to the bill.
DeleteAccording to AI, "Approximately 49% of the 51.3 million foreign-born residents in the U.S. as of 2023 were naturalized citizens, meaning they likely hold U.S. passports, according to this PBS report. An additional 19% are lawful permanent residents, some of whom may hold passports from their home countries, while others may not."
ReplyDeleteIt seems like the SAVE Act might privilege naturalized citizens at the polls, as opposed to red staters who don't travel much, since the immigrants will have US passports, unlike those with little interest in seeing the world and an animosity toward those from other countries.
Old people continue to vote long after they may have surrendered their driving licenses and let their passports expire. Is that fair? Shouldn't they step aside and give youngsters a shot?
ReplyDeleteFrom Digby:
ReplyDelete"Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic sketches a thumbail profile of the sitting U.S. president. Somewhere this exists as a psychological assessment in criminal investigation file:
Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.
He does not consider the wider implications of his decisions. He does not take responsibility when these decisions go wrong. Instead, he acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.
On the fallout just from Trump’s Greenland threats last year:
In Copenhagen a few weeks ago, I was shown a Danish app that tells users which products are American, so that they know not to buy them. At the time it was the most popular app in the country.
Donald Trump has no friends. Donald Trump doesn’t know how to be a friend, and never learned. Friends don’t threaten and insult their friends. Friends don’t demand tribute. Trump does:
He raised tariffs on Switzerland because he didn’t like the Swiss president, then lowered them after a Swiss business delegation brought him presents, including a gold bar and a Rolex watch.
Now Trump needs a bailout in Iran, one that can’t be bought with tax cuts, gold bars or Rolex watches. No one is coming to help. Go figure.
Applebaum concludes:
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada will not participate in the “offensive operations of Israel and the U.S., and it never will.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius says, “This is not our war, and we didn’t start it.” The Spanish prime minister refused to let the United States use bases for the beginning of the war. The U.K. and France might send some ships to protect their own bases or allies in the Gulf, but neither will send their soldiers or sailors into offensive operations started without their assent.
This isn’t cowardice. It’s a calculation: If allied leaders thought that their sacrifice might count for something in Washington, they might choose differently. But most of them have stopped trying to find the hidden logic behind Trump’s actions, and they understand that any contribution they make will count for nothing. A few days or weeks later, Trump will not even remember that it happened.
You bragged that you didn’t need anyone. You got your wish, Donny."
I'm puzzled why Our Host keeps insisting that there's "remarkably little energy" spent on explaining the SAVE act. That information is quite easy to find and has been published widely.
ReplyDeleteNo, it isn't discussed on Fox. The actors there just insist that the act will keep "illegals" from voting, but they don't explain.
There are several parts to the act. One deals with voter registration, another with voting in person, another with voting by mail, and another with verifying the citizenship of voters currently registered.
The short version is this: to register, you must have documentation of citizenship. To cast a vote you must present a photo ID that indicates your citizenship status or if your photo ID doesn't indicate citizenship, a photo ID plus additional documentation of citizenship. The acceptable documents are described in the act.
How many states already indicate citizenship on IDs like drivers licenses? Certainly not all, and, I suspect, a majority does not.
One glaring deficiency regards married women. Their birth certificates don't provide their current names. Marriage certificates are not mentioned specifically as valid evidence of a name change.
In all, the act places significant burdens on state election officials and offers little help to accomplish all that is demanded.
One glaring deficiency regards married women. Their birth certificates don't provide their current names.. That is not a defect of the bill, it is one of the primary features. Keep as many women as possible from voting.
DeleteI doubt that. If such was the case, it would be designed to target single women.
DeleteThere’s probably other ways to target single women
DeleteThere is a very large gender gap in both registrations and voting patterns (Harris vs Trump in 2024) with women favoring Democrats by more than 10 pts, and men favoring Republicans by the same margin. Of course they want to keep women from voting.
DeleteIf you look deeper, you'll see that gap reflects a sharp divide between married and single women.
DeleteOnly certified BCs are allowed too, which most people do NOT have.
DeleteFrom written testimony submitted by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to the Senate Intelligence Committee:
ReplyDelete"As a result of Operation Midnight Hammer, Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There have been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability."
The absence of imminence, isn't it?
So why bomb Iran now? Is it because of the neocon dream (real men go to Tehran)?
DeleteWhy ask why Trump does anything when it is obvious he doesn't think like a normal person, especially not a president. See @4:44 above.
DeleteWhen they do find someone who has violated voting laws, such as voting twice or voting in two states, it is nearly always Republicans who have done it. Trusting people to take the franchise seriously and not abuse it, has long been part of civics classes in High School. There are checks against voting fraud already in place. I do not see this attempt to identify people as they cast their votes as necessary to our process. It is already illegal to vote without the proper status and those laws are being enforced. How then is this a problem that requires a solution that would potentially interfere with legitimate voters casting their votes?
ReplyDeleteSteve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog says:
ReplyDelete"In a column about the SAVE Act -- Donald Trump's top domestic priority -- Jamelle Bouie writes:
For reasons of both ego and ideology, Trump does not believe that he can legitimately lose an election. He is, to his mind, the living embodiment of the nation. If he doesn’t win, then the system must be broken. In that sense, the SAVE Act is far less about American elections as they exist than it is about the president’s vision of American society. The basic premise of Trumpism is that the people of the United States are not the collected citizens of the United States, naturalized and natural born, but a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump.
The SAVE Act is an attempt to make that distinction a political reality by removing as many mere Americans from the voting pool as possible and elevating the true people of the United States — who just so happen to support Trump and the Republican Party — as the only legitimate players in American political life. The goal, then, is to nationalize something akin to what many Americans experienced in the Jim Crow South: a one-party state, backed by the threat of violence, where the law ensures that most people cannot hope for meaningful political representation.
This isn't exactly right. The people who put Jim Crow voting laws in place knew that the Blacks they were disenfranchising were real people born in America who would be allowed to vote if the federal government were able and willing to force the issue. It's my belief that Donald Trump -- influenced by a couple of decades' worth of Republican propaganda -- believes that there simply aren't enough legitimate Democratic voters in America to make the Democratic Party a competitive party. When he says of Democrats, as he did in a speech earlier this month, "They're doing everything possible because they know if we get this, they probably won't win an election for 50 years and maybe longer," I think he legitimately believes that the large number of voters purged from the rolls by the SAVE Act will (a) be overwhelmingly Democratic and (b) be on the rolls fraudulently.
Trump believes this -- believes that all these voters are non-citizen immigrants or dead people or nonexistent people or people otherwise ineligible to vote, possibly because they live on dementia wards or in mental institutions and votes are cast for Democrats in their names -- because he's a Fox News grandpa who's been told over and over again that Democrats cheat in elections on a industrial scale. Millions of other Fox News grandpas and grandmas also believe this." [True The Vote Dinesh D'Souza video omitted]
Cont.
Delete"Trump thinks this is routine. Your Fox-watching relatives think so too. They believe all this happens and they believe that millions of immigrants cross the border and are immediately signed up to vote (always Democratic) and they believe that Democrats slip fake ballots in among the real ones during vote counting and they believe Democrats tamper with voting machines so Republican votes flip to Democratic and...
Jim Crow vote suppressors knew that there were real Americans who would vote against them if they were allowed to. Millions of Republicans seem to believe that there are no legitimate Democratic votes, or very, very few.
They believe this even though they can never produce evidence of this fraud. They believe it the same way they believe that every anti-Trump protestor is a paid agent of the Soros family.
So Trump and his supporters don't exactly believe, as Bouie writes, that "the people of the United States are ... a particular caste and class of Americans, defined by race, religion and nationality and united by their devotion to Trump," excluding Trump critics -- they believe there simply aren't very many sincere Trump critics, or very many Democrats at all, citizens who oppose Trump and his party sincerely and legitimately.
All this, of course, requires them to ignore large chunks of objective reality. But the propaganda they consume has taught them that what everyone outside their bubble portrays as reality must be a lie because people outside their bubble do nothing but lie. Everything they don't want to believe is "fake news." And everything they want to believe is the gospel truth.
I think Trump sincerely believes all this. I'm sure his most fervent fans do. They think the SAVE Act won't disenfranchise a single legitimate voter. It will only disenfranchise Democrats, who are illegitimate voters by definition."
This is why we cannot talk to Republicans about anything. Their worldview is not based on the same facts as we believe exist. I don't know what we can do about this problem, but the first step must surely be to get rid of Trump (the Liar in Chief) and try to return to some agreement about reality. Truth is at the heart of reducing the distance between our parties -- we need to recognize a shared truth and stop calling the truth delivered by media "fake news".
DeleteThe most heartening thing now being said by those who study totalitarian regimes is that "they don't last forever." They topple. I think we need to defend truth and do what we can to resist until these guys do themselves in (as Trump is now doing). Meanwhile, the belief that we need a SAVE Action when there is no problem to be addressed by it is a major point of disagreement between right and left.
Somerby today (and yesterday) does absolutely nothing to defend truth and barely discussed the issues at all. I don't know whether he is too lazy to understand what is going on, or doesn't want to alienate right wingers, but this is not a good faith discussion of why we have a SAVE Act being foisted onto a nation that doesn't need or want such a bill.
DeleteThey don't "topple", they are toppled. They do not fall of their own weight. It will take pain and suffering to topple them. These monsters in charge have no intention of giving up power willingly.
ReplyDeleteAnonymousMarch 18, 2026 at 1:55 AM
"I heard from a reputable source that whoever Mister Fanny is will be making an appearance on the Gutfeld Show sometime next week."
This sounds about right.
Reply
Waiting for DiC to show up here and preen about the latest economic numbers.
ReplyDeleteAnother bloody day in the market.
DeleteMost people do NOT have a certified birth certificate from the county registrar, which is the only one that can be used for ID purposes. They have what’s called a “ceremonial” BC.
ReplyDelete