SAVE Act Advances to the Senate

I guess call your patriarchs to beg for your voting rights ladies?

I taught my English 1001 course in the fall on the subject of voting, and we covered a wide range of topics, with extensive discussion of how claims of voter fraud or non-citizen voting are politicized in efforts to suppress voter turnout to advantage conservatives, despite these instances of voter fraud being exceedingly rare. Republicans love to weaponize “secure elections” to ensure that less women, people of color, and the working class vote in our elections, because they are not interested in governing in a democracy so much as securing their own power.

The SAVE Act that just passed the House is a monster version of those efforts, and would require proof of citizenship and for voters to register in person, meaning you would have to bring a birth certificate that matches your legal name or a U.S. passport. The largest groups this would immediately disenfranchise are married women who changed their last names and folks that can’t afford the passport fees (essentially a poll tax). Amendments were proposed to protect this class of married women voters but they failed, and the House passed legislation that amounts to one of the largest attacks on women voters since suffrage.

I’m sure Peter Thiel and the other technocrat bros are delighted with this act, considering they’ve said one of the biggest problems in American politics is the 19^th Amendment and giving women the right to vote. Unsurprisingly, women tend to vote in their own self-interest (white women choosing Trump TWICE being one clear exception), supporting programs that improve the lives of women and children, while men apparently vote for whoever Joe Rogan tells them to because guns (kidding, sort of).

This gender gap in voting patterns means that the SAVE Act suppressing millions of women’s votes would advantage Republicans who advocate for policies that hurt women and children, like axing food programs, ending no-fault divorce, killing women with abortion bans, or any of the myriad ways the Republican party is trying to shove us all into a tradwife Barbie box so the men can have all those good manufacturing jobs Trump’s going to bring back so they can achieve some kind of retro manhood they heard about in a Bruce Springsteen song.

Fun fact, South Carolina didn’t ratify the 19th Amendment until 1969, and it didn’t make it into state law until 1973.

You’ll be shocked, just shocked, to hear that despite the clear attacks on women voters, our own Congressman William Timmons voted for the bill. Who could have guessed this same womanizing Timmons that cheated on his highly accomplished wife with a tradwifey influencer would turn his back on the women of the Upstate? Elect a patriarch, get patriarchy.

Serena Joy, I mean Karoline Leavitt, isn’t bothered a bit by all these men making bad decisions though. Boys will be boys, right ladies? Hahaha as our country and the world order collapses.

More protests on tap next weekend in Greenville and throughout the country. In that English 1001 class I assigned the four-hour documentary The Vote on women’s fight for suffrage (students are always pretty excited to get that much PBS in their life). The length of the documentary really reinforces how long the fight was, and I’m fully channeling that “we fight even though we might never win in our lifetimes” energy.

Before women had the right to vote, they were protesting and demonstrating, and it is an effective tool for change, especially when voting systems are corrupted, not by non-citizen voting but by unlimited money and unfair districting. And when the people we do elect refuse to listen, we have to keep calling them out. Hope to see you out there.