GOP wants to disenfranchize women voters

From the authoritarian vantage point that increasingly characterizes the GOP, women are less prone to vote the "right" way. Hence, women must be stopped from voting. Thom Hartmann explains the details that don't quite make their way into media coverage of this latest GOP monstrosity:

So, why is this the hill Republicans are willing to die on? Why would Johnson, Trump, and Vance (and so many other Republicans) put so much effort into a lie that will, if acted on, create chaos for American voters?

And why try so hard to force it into a must-pass bill when it has already passed the House of Representatives on a standalone vote? The question contains the seed of its own answer.

The SAVE Act is a proposed federal law, so, first off, it would put a future president (say, Trump) in charge of enforcing it, taking that power away from the states. Millions of voter registrations in any states the president decides are problematic could be removed until those voters “cure” their registrations, and state authorities would have no say in it.

That alone could flip a few blue states red, and make purple states permanently red.

And what will the law require citizens who want to vote do? Lacking a passport or other proof of citizenship with their married names, they must produce both a birth certificate (with the seal of the state where it was issued; no copies allowed) and a current form of identification — both with the exact same name on them. That could instantly disqualify about 90 percent of all married women without passports or other proof that matches their birth certificates or proof of a legal name change.

For women in that situation, they can still register to vote if they can prove that they went to court to change their name when they got married, but most women just start using their new married name without ever going through all those formalities (although a few states recognize marriage as a legal name change).

As a result, as the National Organization for Women (NOW) details in a report on how Republican voter suppression efforts harm women:

“Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.

“That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”

Just by coincidence, Republicans will suggest, at this moment in history millions of American women are seriously pissed off at the GOP.

And, Republicans will tell you, that has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump and Mike Johnson threatening to shut down the government if Democrats don’t go along with these draconian new requirements for women to vote.

I’ll say it again: this effort by Republicans to blackmail Democrats into disenfranchising millions of women just in time for a critical election — just like their claim that legal Haitian immigrants are eating white people’s pets — is complete, utter, unmitigated bullshit.

And the press should do a much better job of calling it exactly what it is.