Mike Johnson, the SAVE Act, and the Sept. 30 Shutdown Deadline

Mike Johnson, the SAVE Act, and the Sept. 30 Shutdown Deadline [Music] from the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal this is pic Watch Speaker Mike Johnson floats a plan to fund the federal government and avoid a shutdown when the fiscal year ends September 30 but after getting push back from his colleagues the speaker cancels a vote that was scheduled Wednesday saying he will work through the weekend to build consensus welcome I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal we are today by my colleagues columnist Kim strael and editorial board member Kate bachelder Odell it's that time again in Washington 19 days until Government funding runs out and non-essential operations grind to a halt the plan proposed by Speaker Mike Johnson had been a continuing resolution to continue the current funding levels through March attached to a bill called the Safeguard American voter eligibility Act act or the save act which would require voters Nationwide to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote let's listen to a clip of speaker Johnson at a press conference on Tuesday arguing that the save Act is needed on this bill I am in this to win this I believe as I just told you this is a conviction I feel deep in my heart I've have been a co-sponsor of the save act from the beginning and I think it's something we must do that's why it's worth fighting for I'm not going to engage in conjecture and and uh you know try to game out all the outcomes I think this is something that we should do and that's what we're doing I told the conference at this morning I'll say it here again I am resolved on this I and I don't know what more I can say to show that conviction and here from the other side of the capital building is Senate leader Mitch McConnell on this funding problem coming down the pike well I think we first have to see what the house sends us and then of course how to handle that will be up to the majority leader I would remind you I've been both majority's better uh but the first step out of be what comes out of the house and I think we don't know right now I think a government shutdown if it happens over the save back could jeopardize Republican Prospect from the government shutdown is always a bad idea at any time Kim what are the competing Competing Tensions tensions here we know we have divided government and speaker Johnson has a very narrow majority but what is the needle that he is trying to thread here to make sure that the government continues funding and we don't go into a shutdown which agree with Mitch McConnell there is generally a bad idea particularly for Republicans I agree too let's take just a second to remind everyone how he got here in theory Congress is supposed to pass both the house and the Senate each 12 spending bills funding the government if the government is funded from the end of September to the end of September they pass those bills in theory you come together in a conference they come to an agreement they're sent to the president you fund the budget this is a process that has not happened the way it was supposed to happen happen probably since I've been alive so I do give the House Republicans credit they said they wanted to return to regular order they did manage to pass more than half a dozen of those bills through the floor but the Senate has passed none of them under Democrats we are now 19 days until the government therefore runs out of money with Appropriations not passed through bull chambers of Congress so the default now is a continuing resolution that will continue to fund the government until Congress can find the time to actually sit down and be more methodical about their priorities so this CR would simply extend funding at the levels it's at now Johnson is dealing with some competing interests within his own caucus he has proposed a six-month CR under the belief that it would be good to avoid having to tackle this during a lame duck better to make your bets that Republicans will have the house and the Senate and possibly the white house where they will have more ability to determine how that spending goes there are those that would rather have a three-month one because I think if Donald Trump wins he should be given a clean slate Etc there are also some that would rather deal with it in the lame duck because they see an opportunity to get more spending if they do that separately those who are very conservative in the Republican caucus are not happy with ACR in general because they think we need to be doing more about spending so as a sweetener Johnson threw one of their priorities which is this save act which essentially requires proof of citizenship when people go to register to vote this has become more of an issue as some localities have begun to suggest they'd like to let people vote at least in local elections who are non-citizens this has become very disturbing to a lot of Republicans so this was meant to sweeten the deal at this point I would note about 92 93% of his caucus is on board with this package put ahead but as you note it's a very narrow caucus so you have some defense Hawks who are unhappy about the notion of a six-month C and what that will do to military spending and then you have some Rebels who are the usual names the Matt Gates's Etc who declare they will never vote for a CR that government must do more to cut spending and that if that can't happen let's just shut the whole thing down he had to pull the bill because he didn't have enough people to vote for it on a plann vote on Wednesday and so now he's going to try to whip people over the weekend and see if he can get to that number my guess is that he will not be able to and there will have to be a plan B Kate zeroing in on the the objections of these defense Hawk Republicans what The Damage to America’s Military Posture is the damage that they see being done to America's military posture and its Readiness by these kinds of continuing resolutions these flat funding levels and why do they oppose going six months versus a shorter bill that would take it maybe to December sure basically what as Kim said what a continuing resolution does is hold the Pentagon both at last year's funding levels and also locks in last year's priorities both are important to note I mean the world looked different even one year ago today prior to the October 7th attack on Israel so what you basically would have is a pretty significant Pentagon cut last year's funding levels are about six billion less than what the Pentagon is supposed to get this year but the real cut is a lot steeper because there are bills that the Pentagon has to pay they have to pay out a 4.5% pay raise for troops cost about 5 billion they have to increase the housing allowance for troops to try to keep up with Rising home prices in some markets that's another billion so you have these bills that they have to pay and then what ends up becoming taxed is basically procurement and Readiness your core military capabilities so something that the defense department can't do Under A continuing resolution is reprogram you know how many of which kind of weapons it wants to buy it LS getting contracts out the door we have now kind of bipartisan agreement that the US has insufficient weapon stocks after helping Ukraine and Israel and that we need to make more particularly of long range weapons this gums up that process and slows it down but also just basic military Readiness tasks I mean one thing that the Pentagon is warning about that will be delayed under a six-month CR is the midlife refueling of an aircraft carrier aircraft carriers have to have substantial maintenance in the middle of their long life cycle and so that will basically take a carrier and delay it getting back in the action even as the United States is really struggling to keep aircraft carriers in the Middle East to deter that war from spreading and also keep aircraft carriers in the Pacific to Tamp down tensions in the Philippines and also with the Chinese Communist party so it does take a toll on core made military capabilities to lock the Pentagon in at last year's levels and again also last year's priorities now the Pentagon has gotten accustomed to operating with some degree of continuing resolutions to starting the year on these kind of stop Gap measures but a six-month measure is halfway through the year before they're allowed to reprogram the money there are some things Congress can do to mitigate these effects in the jargon it's called anomalies that they can write into the continuing resolution and say for instance okay well work on the nuclear Triad submarines the Colombia class submarine that can continue as we try to avoid delaying the overhaul of our nuclear Triad they can do big things like that to try to minimize the impact but I you know as I just described there is a core impact to how the military functions that you can't overcome when you're operating Under A continuing resolution so that is why I think shorter is much better for the Pentagon and in the current world moment not a signal America I think wants to send to the world that is not serious about fulfilling one of congress's core obligations which is funding National Defense hang tight we'll be right back back in a moment welcome back another piece of what makes the spending Dynamic a bit odd in the house is that the save Act is going nowhere in the Senate which is controlled by democrats and the speaker and his allies I think certainly know that and I would add some criticisms here on the substance of this this looks like a provision that is meant as messaging more than policy one is that those Provisions requiring proof of citizenship say they take effect on passage of the bill and to my mind this is not the time for either party to be sending down mandates from Washington's to State and local election officials 53 days before a national election and remember we have a very decentralized election system in the United States and so I worry that if this kind of thing got passed there would be people who are registering to vote today 5 minutes before passage of the bill or 5 minutes after the passage of the bill who are left in limbo because these orders from Washington are percolating their way down through the system another is that the bill the save act says here's a provision under any method of voter registration in a state the state shall not accept in process an application to register to vote unless the applicant presents documentary proof of the United States citizenship and then it provides a list of option options including a passport and a birth certificate and a real ID compliant photo identification card and I know the driver's license that's in my pocket and I think in the pockets of about half of Americans are still not compliant with that 2005 real ID act and every time I go through the TSA checkpoint at the airport I see the sign that says someday soon you will need a real ID to get through this checkpoint but they keep kicking the effective date on that and so I worry that there's a real problem if you have people who are showing up and they have proof of their identity and the state and the federal government certainly know whether or not they're US citizens or not but they don't have that kind of card that specifies that citizenship on their driver's license the way that they are used to when they are registering to vote and then a third objection here is I think it's true that even reviews in red states have not found wide spread examples of non-citizen voting here's a line from an Associated Press story and 2022 Georgia Secretary of State Brad raffensberger a republican conducted an audit of his State's voter roles specifically looking for non-citizens his office found that 1634 had attempted to register but election officials had caught all the applications and none were actually registered to vote and Kim I mean obviously vigilance is important with this kind of thing and I do think that there are updates that Congress can make to the Motor Voter law to help States and maybe require states to do a better job at cleaning out their voter roles and to ensure that people who are not eligible don't get on the voter roles in the first place but I question whether 52 days before an election is the time to do it in the first place notable though that Donald Trump is working hard to kind of back speaker Johnson into a corner here here is what he said in a podcast last month he said if the save Act is not in the bill that Republicans should close up and accept a government shutdown yeah I agree that the issue here is primarily one of timing and I think that it would be good for Republicans to step back and look at this bill a little bit more in terms of the timing when would be the best time to do it but also in terms of L held principles that they have about the federal government being engaged to much of an extent in state voting setups and state voting laws I mean it was Republicans who very much didn't want to see the Motor Voter law passed they've had huge objections to the Biden Administration using government offices to encourage voter registration and ways that they feel aren't always nonpartisan and so they just need to make sure that the provisions that are in this bill really do conform with their broader principles about State's rights and the state ability to lead the way on their own voting rules remember it's Democrats right now who are pushing for a federal takeover of State voting laws so that's a fine balance that being said I also can understand there's been a lot of complaints about how flat-footed Republicans were in 2020 about all these moves to change election laws in the wake of covid and in ways it did seem to violate long-standing principles and how they found themselves after all the voting had taken place on the back foot attempting to litigate a lot of these things so they're trying now to take a more forward looking approach it isn't clear that this is a problem right now but it also is clear that there are many Democratic leaders across the country especially in local and municipalities who would love to open up voting to migrants who are not US citizens and there could be a lot of confusion at that point about the distinction between state and local elections and federal elections which clearly prohibit that so I think they're trying to get a jump on the game but doing it 52 days as you say before an election I think you can make an argument this might not be necessary either in the long run because states have become very much aware of this issue and you've had more than a half a dozen of them that have already passed their own rules governing this you've got other ones in which the governors have been sending out reminders that have to be given alongside those Motor Voter forms pointing out to people that you are not allowed to vote in a federal election if you are not a US citizen so there's a lot of work that's already being done at the state level and it could well be that that makes this entire question mood at some point [Music]