House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Thursday denounced President Trump’s recent executive order to make voting rules more strict, saying it’s an illegal power grab that will quickly be rejected by the courts.
“The executive order that was recently issued by President Trump is not worth the paper it has been written on,” Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol. “It will be challenged in court, and it will be invalidated.”
Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order designed to overhaul how elections are conducted across the country. Central to the decree is a new proof-of-citizenship mandate, forcing states to require prospective voters to show passports, drivers licenses or other forms of government ID in order to register.
Under current federal law, prospective voters must swear an oath that they’re citizens to gain registration, but not produce an ID. Violators can face charges of perjury.
Trump and his GOP allies have cast the tougher rules as a common-sense change that’s critical in weeding out voter fraud, which the president and many Republicans have claimed was the only reason for former President Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020.
They have produced no evidence to back that allegation, however, and the courts dismissed more than 60 lawsuits challenging Biden’s win.
Democrats have opposed the stricter voting rules, noting that cases of voter fraud are exceedingly rare in the U.S. With that in mind, they say Trump’s executive order has a more sinister purpose: to discourage voting by low-income people who tend to vote Democratic and are least likely to have up-to-date government IDs.
Jeffries on Thursday said Republicans have “zero credibility” when it comes to safeguarding elections and protecting democracy. Quite aside from Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election based on false claims of fraud, Jeffries also pointed to the GOP’s recent effort to redraw the congressional map in North Carolina.
The Tar Heel State is split roughly 50/50 between the parties, and it recently elected a Democratic governor and attorney general. But Republican gerrymandering heavily favors the GOP in the U.S. House, where the state’s delegation was evenly divided in the last Congress — seven Republicans and seven Democrats — but now leans heavily towards Republicans, 10 to four, under the new map.
“Republicans have actually concluded that voter suppression is an electoral strategy,” Jeffries charged. “These people in the House wouldn’t even be in the majority right now if it weren’t for the egregious, mid-decade, highly partisan gerrymandering that took place in North Carolina. Think about that. They would not even be in the majority right now, but then they’re running around the country claiming to have a mandate.
“Give me a break.”
