It didn’t matter to Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick that the SAVE Act is “a direct attack on the fundamental right to vote and a dangerous step backward for our democracy,” as Celina Stewart, CEO of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of the United States, points out.
He voted for it anyway.
And it didn’t matter that, as Stewart added, the SAVE Act “is based on misinformation and fearmongering rather than facts” about imaginary widespread non-citizen voter fraud.
No, Fitzpatrick fell in line with the MAGA Republican Congress, who with the help of four dunderheaded Democrats passed this voter suppression bill.
No, it didn’t matter that this bill amounts to a “21st Century poll tax,” as the nonpartisan New Pennsylvania Project’s CEO Kadida Kenner says, and that it “disproportionately harms working people, young voters, new Americans, anyone who has changed their name, such as married people taking their spouse’s last name, and Black and brown communities.”
President Donald Trump wanted this bill requiring documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, so Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District representative obeyed.
Nor did it matter that “proof of citizenship potentially disenfranchises 69 million married women whose new last names do not match their birth certificate, Republican voters who are less likely than Democrats to have passports to prove citizenship and would erect significant voter registration hurdles for the service men and women protecting our country overseas,” as Common Cause President & CEO Virginia Kase Solomón states.
For Fitzpatrick, all of the undemocratic consequences of the bill didn’t matter enough to change his mind, and God forbid vote against Trump and the MAGA Republican Party.
But the real question is, will this vote, and Fitzpatrick’s other votes like it, matter enough to local constituents to finally vote this out-of-touch, out-of-sight GOP lawmaker out of office.
