Three Utah Republicans, Reps. Blake Moore, Burgess Owens and Celeste Maloy voted to pass a last-minute stopgap bill to prevent a government shutdown next week. Rep. John Curtis was one of 82 Republicans who voted against the measure on Wednesday afternoon.
Passage of the bill was a blow to Sen. Mike Lee and former President Donald Trump, who spent weeks urging House Republicans to include legislation outlawing non-citizens from voting in federal elections - which is already illegal.
The funding bill maintains current discretionary spending levels through Dec. 20. The Senate is set to vote on the bill Wednesday evening. Passage will avoid a politically disastrous government shutdown just a few weeks before the November election.
In a statement provided to Utah Political Watch, Rep. John Curtis said he voted against the funding bill because of a flawed process.
"I cannot in good conscience vote in favor of this federal funding bill and continue the broken budget process. We are way outside of regular order. Congress has not followed our appropriations process since 1996, forcing us into a cycle of government shutdowns and last-minute omnibus bills. We need real solutions, not just more delays. It's time to get our fiscal house in order and hold ourselves accountable, just like Utahns do every day in their own lives," Curtis said.
Lee has relentlessly pushed House leadership to include legislation known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act. The legislation, passed earlier this year by the House, would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, which federal law already bans.
House GOP leadership attempted to tack the SAVE Act onto the spending bill but abandoned that effort when it became apparent there was insufficient support for the plan.
On his personal X/Twitter account, Lee has latched on to any and every conspiracy theory about Democrats using hordes of non-citizens to cheat in the 2024 election to show the need for the legislation. Just this week, Lee reposted a chart from the notorious conspiracy-peddling account "Wall Street Ape," that purported to show millions of people registering to vote without ID.
If only there were a bill we could attach to the spending bill that would stop noncitizens from voting.
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) September 24, 2024
Oh wait. #PassTheSAVEAct https://t.co/bLWeicH5ks
The chart shows data from the HAVV (Help America Vote Verification) system, which helps verify the identity of people who register to vote but don't have a driver's license. In that case, their identity is matched to a name, birth date and Social Security Number.
There's little evidence that non-citizens are registering to vote, and certainly not frequently enough to tip an election. A Brennan Center for Justice study analyzed 23.5 million ballots cast in 42 jurisdictions during the 2020 election. The study found an estimated 30 incidents of potential but unsubstantiated non-citizen voting.
Republicans and far-right figures have amplified the panic over non-citizen voting. Former President Donald Trump has brought up the issue on the campaign trail, and Elon Musk has latched onto the made-up controversy.
Lee's longtime ally, Cleta Mitchell, has been working for months to turn the specter of non-citizen voting into a campaign issue ahead of November. Mitchell, the leader of the Election Integrity Network, has assembled a coalition of more than 70 right-wing groups known as the "Only Citizens Vote Coalition" to use anti-immigrant rhetoric to stoke fears of non-citizen voting.
Mitchell was a legal adviser to Donald Trump's 2020 campaign and participated in the infamous phone call in which Trump pressured election officials in Georgia to "find 11,870 votes," which was just enough to overturn Democrat Joe Biden's win in that state.
The congressional probe into Trump's attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, revealed Lee and Mitchell communicated frequently in the aftermath of Trump's loss, strategizing ways to reverse Trump's election loss.
Unsurprisingly, Lee is working so hard to assist Mitchell's effort, as the two have been longtime allies. In 2017, she represented his campaign in a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission over campaign donations. A year later, she signed a letter supporting Lee as a potential United States Supreme Court nominee.