The GOP Is Playing Chicken at the Worst Possible Time (for the GOP)

When the political history of our era is written, the story line will be that the Republican Party, in its death throes, declared war on the government and then on the voting public. Our grandchildren will ask why a half-century of decline played out so very slowly that before it was over even Dick Cheney went over to the other side. We asked ourselves that at the time, we’ll explain, repeatedly concluding, erroneously, that this or that debasement would finally sever the Republican Party from the electoral minority sustaining it. It was like that game, Jenga, we’ll say. Players take turns removing rectangular wood blocks from the middle of a tall stack. You never know which will bring the tower down.

It’s widely presumed that the loser of this game will be Donald Trump, but it might be House Speaker Mike Johnson. At the direction of his “chaos caucus” (a coinage by Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska)—and egged on, of course, by Trump—Johnson is tying passage of an appropriations bill that must pass by September 30 to a bill that requires voters to present proof of citizenship when they vote. In effect, Johnson is making disenfranchisement the price of governance.

Should the Democratic Senate refuse to play ball, Johnson will shut part of the government down. But there’s no suspense here: We know already that the Senate won’t play ball. As Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday in a “Dear Colleague” to Senate Democrats: “We will not let poison pills or Republican extremism put funding for critical programs at risk.” In the unlikely event that the voting bill were to land on Biden’s desk, he’s pledged to veto it. There’s no reason for Schumer or Biden to cry uncle because Republicans always get blamed when the government gets shut down—and this time, a presidential election will come one month later. For Republicans, the timing couldn’t be worse.

Johnson surely will want to back down, but Trump may not let him. “I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it,” Trump said last month to the podcast host (and serial plagiarist) Monica Crowley. “If they don’t get these bills they should close it down.” Trump said it a third time, too. The mere fact that Trump says something three times or 12 times or 100 times doesn’t guarantee he won’t say the opposite if that suits him; that’s what happened, for example, with cryptocurrency. But Trump inclines toward obstreperousness on matters related to voting, even to the point of compromising his own political interest. In another person, we might call this integrity. In Trump, it’s probably declining cognition.

The Republican strategy, such as it is, is that because immigration is politically unpopular, it’s good politics to force Democrats to oppose requiring voters to show proof of citizenship. Noncitizens are barred from voting in the first place, so what’s the big deal? The big deal is that a lot of eligible voters would end up not voting because they can’t easily put their hands on a birth certificate, naturalization document, or passport. The requirement would make sense if noncitizen voting were rampant, but studies have shown, repeatedly, that it’s quite rare. This is a country whose chronic voting problem isn’t that too many people vote, but rather too few.

The real reason Republicans want to require proof of citizenship is that it would reduce Democratic participation more. According to a 2006 survey by the Brennan Center, about 12 percent of people earning less than $25,000 (typically Democrats) did not have readily available citizenship documents, as against 7 percent of the general population. The proof-of-citizenship requirement would also have a disparate impact on women (a majority of whom are Democrats), because they’re much likelier than men to have changed their surname. According to the Brennan Center survey, about one-third of all women possessing proof of citizenship lacked a document bearing their current legal name.

Another obstacle the bill imposes is a photo ID requirement. The document likeliest to serve this purpose is a driver’s license, but according to a January 2024 survey by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement, 27 percent of Black Americans (overwhelmingly Democrats) lack a driver’s license listing their current address, against 18 percent of white Americans. The proof-of-citizenship bill would also disadvantage younger voters (strongly Democratic), because 41 percent of those aged 18 to 25 and 38 percent of those aged 25 to 29 lack an up-to-date driver’s license. Overall, 23 percent of Democrats lack an up-to-date driver’s license, against 16 percent of Republicans.

None of this should be particularly difficult for Democrats to explain to voters. Lugging a bunch of documents to your polling place would make voting as much of a nuisance as obtaining a passport. Who needs that? If America had a problem with noncitizens voting, it might be reasonable to add this kind of precaution. But Republicans have been searching for evidence of this phantasmic crisis for a generation and they still haven’t found it. Republicans are the party that wants the smallest number to go the polls, because Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” is a thing of the past. Democrats are the party that wants everybody who’s eligible to vote. Which looks more attractive?

Democrats could further point out that the proof-of-citizenship requirement hurts the working class, a Democratic constituency that went for Trump in the last election. Hey Republicans, you want to be the party of the working stiff? Then don’t pass a bill that gives college graduates (now a Democratic constituency) more voting strength at the expense of high school graduates. Only 17 percent of college grads lack an up-to-date driver’s license, against 24 percent of high school grads (and 41 percent of high school dropouts).

Should Johnson follow through on his ultimatum and shut the government down, he’ll give Democrats an excellent talking point: The same Republican Party that shuts down Washington at the drop of a hat now wants to shut voting down, too. Might that be because, in a free and fair election, Republicans can’t win?

I’m not going to predict that a government shutdown will be the Jenga block that finishes off the GOP. I’ve been wrong too many times before. But if you’ve played Jenga, you know that each time you pull out one of those feather-light rectangular blocks, you make the structure slightly less stable. We can’t know in advance which block will pull the whole tower down. I hope to God the game ends before Donald Trump ever returns to the White House. But a reckoning is coming.