don’t threaten me with a good time (13. 248)

Amidst the constellation of a failing economy, hemispheric bellicosity, a partial government shutdown and a widening war in the Middle East poised to turn into a quagmire, US president Trump has made his legislative priorities clear by saying he will withhold endorsement of any bills that reach his desk until the SAVE act is passed. An acronym for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, the proposed reform to the National Voter Registration act of 1993 would require “documentary proof of citizenship” in order to register to participate in elections. With the stated purpose of preventing voter fraud and non-citizens from voting in federal elections, which is vanishingly rare, it is a vehicle for disenfranchising a large swaths of the population who don’t have accepted identity documents on hand and/or don’t have the occasion to present them selves to an official for adjudication ahead of registration deadlines—much less to clear up discrepancies between one’s birth certificate and passport over a maiden-name. The GOP sponsored version up for debate for the mid-terms also includes the requirement that states (which control voting though there are also efforts in motion to federalise the process) share voting rolls with the Department of Homeland Security and the abolition of mail-in ballots. Under the current sixty vote threshold for senate passage, Republicans cannot pass the bill without the support of Democrats, who have made clear they will not condone voter suppression, and despite Trump’s urging the upper chamber, Republicans will not drop the filibuster for fear of blowback. Whilst the impasse does seem to suggest more gridlock and would be frankly preferable to the paucity of actually congressional legislation passed under Trump, his penchant for executive orders and a pliable supreme court have done the job of governing, there are still the technicalities of the pocket veto—usually used, when timed right, to kill a bill through inaction, but the opposite holds true as well, with an absentee congress remaining in session forces passage.