The Save Me From Impeachment Act

     The Republican-driven SAVE Act, that Trump has cynically renamed the SAVE America Act, looks as if it's as dead in the water as a Venezuelan fishing boat, at least in the Senate. Among its Pandora's Box of evils is making women prove their identity if they got married and changed their names. Here's the thing and maybe something right wing activist Cleta Mitchell never realized: Republican women also get married and change their names.

      If the SAVE Act, God forbid, passes (It ground its way through the House, passing by a 218-213 vote), it'll make it much more difficult for married women to even register to vote much less actually vote. As usual, Republicans are dressing this up as an attempt to save voting integrity even though instances of illegal voting always falls far below 0.01%. But this is how Republicans are trying to sell it. 

     Trump, believe it or not, is much more nakedly honest about it. Last January 6, ironically, Trump told Republicans that Democrats will "find a reason to impeach me." 

     So there you have it. Trump is so frantic about getting impeached and expelled from office (although that would be a tall order in the Senate) that he's even willing to disenfranchise Republican female voters. Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL) said, "Nearly 69 million women in America have a birth certificate that do  not match their current name and therefore 69 million American women would no longer be eligible to vote."

      That's a pretty huge hunk of the US electorate. According to the US Census Bureau (pdf), 174,000,000 Americans were registered to vote in the 2024 election. That means Republicans are willing to take away the vote of a whopping 39.66% of the electorate just because they got married.

     That's pretty insane, not to mention misogynist, because that would disenfranchise tens of millions of Republican female voters. And male Republican lawmakers couldn't care less because those antidiluvian douchebags secretly wish women never got the right to vote in 1920.

      But, really, it's all about Trump escaping impeachment. Republicans (including, amazingly, every single Republican female in the House) gave Trump what he wanted. Because, when Republicans crunch numbers, they zero in on demographics they deem insufficiently loyal to their party. They enact, or try to, voter suppression tactics hat home in with surgical accuracy on those demographics in which they're underperforming. Rather than work to get those voters to their side, these authoritarian assholes always default to voter suppression tactics under some risible ruse such as "electoral integrity" even if it means denying their own voters the right to vote.

     In other words, throwing out the baby with the bath water.