Jen Psaki Obliterates GOP Bill Criminalizing Non-Citizens Voting in Elections: ‘That’s Already a Crime!

PSAKI: “So, in the usual flood of news this week, you may have missed the latest chapter in the MAGA effort to spread doubt about the integrity of our elections. I mean, we love talking about stories that are undercovered here. So this week, Speaker Mike Johnson and a merry gang of election-denying Republicans held a press conference on the Capitol steps and they were introducing a bill at that press conference that criminalizes something that is already very illegal_ non-citizens voting in federal elections. But more notable than some completely unnecessary legislation and the press conference accompanying it is the narrative they are trying to push.”

[Clip starts]
Johnson: “There is currently an unprecedented and a clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system, and that is the threat of non-citizens and illegal aliens voting in our election. (...) It is true that Democrats have expressed a desire to turn non-citizens into voters. That is what this open border has been all about.”
(...)
MILLER: “It’s a combination of a wide open border and obstruction of any effort to verify the citizenship of who votes in our elections. These things are, all combined, an effort to end our Republican form of government.”
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PSAKI: “Every time Stephen Miller shows up at a press conference, you know it is going to be crazy. But there’s a whole lot of conspiracy brain to unpack here. First, the speaker of the House and his fellow Republicans are falsely claiming that millions of non-citizens illegally vote. Look, Republican election conspiracies are nothing new, but what makes those remarks from Johnson even more outrageous is the brazen attempt to actually tie two right-wing conspiracies together, all of them with a bow: their false claim of mass election fraud, and their racist and frankly dumb replacement theory. We’ve talked about this on our show before, it’s the once fringe but now apparently mainstream Republican dogma that Democrats and elites are purposefully bringing in migrants from third-world countries in order to dilute the influence of political power of real Americans. ‘Real Americans.’ According to Johnson and his colleagues, Joe Biden has opened the border to as many migrants as possible in order to activate them as fraudulent Democratic votes come November. That is crazy. That theory is not only false and racist and dangerous and insane, but it also crumbles under the slightest weight of the most basic questions.”

[Clip starts]
Reporter: “Are you saying that there are currently non-residents voting in federal elections? And if that’s what you’re saying, do you have an estimate of how many?”
Johnson: “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number.”
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PSAKI: “‘We know intuitively, but it’s not easily provable.’ I mean, that’s like saying, ‘I don’t know it for a fact, but I think it’s true.’ So, Mike Johnson desperately wants you to trust his vibes, basically. But what he’s talking about just isn’t a thing. Don’t take it from me, that is according to the Brennan Center which found that non-citizen voting is vanishingly rare. That’s according to conservative Cato Institute, which said that ‘non-citizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.’ And this is pretty rich, maybe my favorite: It’s even according to the hard-right Heritage Foundation, which, according to their own database, reports less than 100 cases of non-citizens illegally voting between 2002 and 2023. The Heritage Foundation, I will remind you, was also the home of the nearly 1000-page Project 2025 plan on their website. Less than 100 cases in a period where literally hundreds of millions of votes were cast. It is just not a thing that happens on any significant level. And why would it? As I said at the top, non-citizens can’t vote, that’s already a crime. At best, this Republican legislation pushes a solution looking for a problem. But far more alarming, it is intended to sow the seeds of doubt about our country’s elections should Donald Trump lose. We are not going to take our eye off of it, we’ll keep talking about it, and neither should you.”