Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., compared the Republican Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act to Jim Crow 2.0 again during an interview on Sunday, when pressed on the overwhelming support for requiring ID to vote in the U.S.
The New York senator was asked about Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Kristi Noem talking about DHS’s role in overseeing elections. She said in the clip played by CNN during “State of the Union” that they need to make sure come Election Day, the right people are voting.
Schumer called the statement a “load of bull,” and argued that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shouldn’t be anywhere near polling places.
CNN’s Jake Tapper said, “About 83% of the American people, including a majority of Democrats, support voter ID laws.”
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“Well, yes, the voter ID laws that, first, each state can have its own voter ID laws, and some do and some don’t. But, secondly, what they are proposing in this so-called SAVE Act is like Jim Crow 2.0. They make it so hard to get any kind of voter ID that more than 20 million legitimate people, mainly poorer people and people of color, will not be able to vote under this law. We will not let it pass in the Senate. We are fighting it tooth and nail,” Schumer said.
“It’s an outrageous proposal, that is, that shows the sort of political bias of the MAGA right. They don’t want poor people to vote. They don’t want people of color to vote, because they often don’t vote for them,” Schumer said.
Schumer has previously compared the SAVE Act to “Jim Crow 2.0.”
The House of Representatives advanced the bill on Wednesday, and only one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, supported the legislation.
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Other liberal senators and lawmakers have also decried the law in spite of polling showing support for voter ID.
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., when confronted about the public support for voter ID, said the SAVE Act would still be something that disenfranchises voting.
“It’s still going to be something that disenfranchises people that don’t have the proper Real ID, driver’s license ID, that don’t have the ID necessary to vote, even though they are citizens. This is another way to simply try to suppress the vote,” Schiff said earlier this month during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was also confronted about support for voter ID during a CNN interview earlier this month.
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Jeffries insisted that even states like New York already have voter identification requirements and claimed the SAVE Act was an attempt by the Republican Party to rig elections.
“The question is that what Republicans are trying to do is to engage in clear and blatant voter suppression,” Jeffries said. “They know that if there‘s a free and fair election in November, they‘re going to lose. In fact, Republicans have been losing every single election since Donald Trump was sworn in January of last year, including most recently, decisively in Texas. And of course, losing all across the country up and down the ballot in the November off-year elections in places like New Jersey or Virginia [or] New York.”
