The SAVE America Act Won't Pass
Con, Inc. | \ ˈkän-ˌiNGk \ | noun
The professional class of conservative activists in Washington, D.C.; the network of think tanks, advocacy groups, media outlets, consultants, and fundraisers whose members make a paid career of conservative politics. Often used pejoratively to suggest that movement conservatism has become a self-sustaining industry more invested in its own institutional survival than in advancing the causes it claims to champion.
“The grassroots wanted a fighter; Con, Inc. wanted another fundraising email.”
The SAVE America Act, if the President vetoes the bipartisan housing legislation, will have served a great purpose. But it is not going to pass.
I once convinced myself that if the GOP just shut down the government and kept it shut down, we could force Obama to cave on Obamacare. I actively supported the shutdown that began that fight.
Conservatives got nothing out of it. We wasted our time. But, like Elizabeth Warren, nevertheless, we persisted.
I support the SAVE America Act. I think its intentions are good. It will not, contrary to what I had thought, require already registered voters to re-register with proof of citizenship. But it can very likely require an existing registered voter who moves to now have to track down a birth certificate to register.
It is already against federal law for non-citizens to vote in federal elections. It absolutely happens. There are documented instances of it. But, to my knowledge, it is not a significant pattern and practice.
I do, however, think it would be wise that, in the future, one must show proof of citizenship to register to vote, and any state that allows non-citizens to vote in local elections should be deprived of federal money for any and all purposes. Some cities want non-citizen voting participation at the local level.
But the reality is the SAVE America Act is not going to pass. There will be no talking filibuster in the Senate. There will be no end to the filibuster. Republicans would rather prioritize appointing life-tenured judges than humor Con, Inc. largely because there are not enough votes among Republicans in the United States Senate.
I suspect the lack of Republican votes is why, the day after Senator Lee called for a talking filibuster, Senator Lee gave his consent to shutting down the Senate for the Fourth of July recess and went on home.
Con, Inc. screaming at Susan Collins helps Susan Collins in Maine. It does not help get the legislation passed. The President throwing a temper tantrum about the legislation also helps Susan Collins and might just get the housing legislation vetoed. Both would be great.
But no real case has been made to the American people. Hardly anyone knows what it is outside of conservative media and online conservatives. The activists care. No one else does.
Con, Inc., like the progressives of 2016 and 2020, has confused Twitter for reality and fights like hell on Twitter behind a keyboard, but has not persuaded the vast majority of people who are not on Twitter.
If the Republicans drafted a very clean piece of legislation that simply says every voter must show a government-issued photographic identification to vote, the GOP would be united, and they would fail to get sixty votes in the Senate, but the GOP could run on Democrat opposition to voter ID, which has the backing of over 80% of Americans.
The GOP cannot even get to 50 Republican votes in the Senate for the SAVE America Act, and the sponsors of the legislation — all of them great people and conservative warriors —, the President, and Con, Inc., have zero leverage to get it passed.
Instead, they can anger the base and disaffect Republican voters so much that they internally suppress the vote in November. That’s it. All they can do now is convince Republican voters, as Democratic Socialists surge, to stay home because the GOP won’t pass an act most Americans couldn’t care less about. In 2021, over 500,000 Republicans stayed home in Georgia and handed the United States Senate to the Democrats because they believed the stolen election lies. How many will stay home this November, believing the lie that if the SAVE America Act does not pass, the GOP can never win again? It is a strange argument to make, by the way, when the GOP cannot even get 50 Republicans in the Senate to support it.
While Con, Inc. convinces conservatives to stay home in November because the SAVE America Act won’t pass, the Democratic Socialists have launched a coup of the Democratic Party and nominated, among others, Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City.
Chevalier won the wealthy, college-educated whites. Her opponent, the incumbent Democrat Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, got the immigrants. They’re both progressives, but the ousted incumbent does not hate America.
Chevalier has called for the eradication of the United States, has urged violence and unrest in the United States, supports the destruction of the “American Empire,” and:
She called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders.
She clarified her position on defunding the police by writing that her vision “means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever.”
She retweeted posts saying “yes, literally abolish the border” and “all deportation is wrong”.
She called the United States “a fucking disgrace”, referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land, and joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag.
She wrote favorably about communism, wrote “seize the means of production”, called for nationalizing utilities, pharmaceutical companies, and “seiz[ing] all properties from landlords”, and wrote that “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.”
She called Joe Biden a “rapist” and a “war criminal” and said she wouldn’t vote for him, said “fuck Kamala Harris”, and criticized Bernie Sanders and AOC for being too pro-Israel.
She retweeted a post saying “Israel doesn’t exist”.
She wrote that Black and Arab men “[fetishize] ugly colonizer women”.
