House Democrats on Friday voted in favor of supporting cities that allow illegal aliens and other non-citizens to vote in local elections, flying in the face of a similar-but-opposite resolution last year by the GOP to condemn such local rules.
The Democrat-led House voted 228-197 vote in support of the measure as part of the larger H.R. 1, or “For the People Act,” championed by Democrats as a way to expand voting access and get “big money” out of politics. On top of supporting localities’ right to allow non-citizens to vote, the bill also strips states of their ability to redraw their own congressional districts, enacts online voter registration or automatic registration, and bans states from removing voters from their voter rolls, which is often used to purge unlawfully registered persons or non-citizens from voter registries.
Just to clarify, the measure doesn’t open the doors for illegal aliens to vote in federal elections like congressional and presidential races, but does openly support cities like San Francisco that allow non-citizens to vote locally. However, with moves like this one, it’s not hard to see how efforts to expand voting rights to non-citizens nationally would be too far off.
Democrats defended their stance by claiming the move opens up Democracy and expands voting “rights” – apparently, even to people who aren’t actual members of the country in which they’re now voting alongside law-abiding citizens.
“We are prepared to open up the political process and let all of the people come in,” Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis claimed.
“H.R. 1 restores the people’s faith that government works for the public interest, the people’s interests, not the special interests,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi added during a press conference Friday.
And also not, apparently, the interests of the people actually paying the taxes.