House Speaker Mike Johnson has continued the proud tradition of GOP speakers setting the country on course to another disastrous government shutdown by pulling voting on a temporary spending bill that included the nonstarter SAVE Act, a bill to require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship for voter registration in federal elections.

That Johnson described this as “the most pressing issue right now” goes to show not only how out of touch his wing of the Republican Party is with ordinary voters, who are by and large concerned with things like the cost of child care and food, but with reality itself.

We challenge Johnson or anyone of his backers to produce evidence — any evidence — that noncitizen registration or voting is a significant issue in any respect. It is both exceedingly rare and, in such cases when it has happened, almost invariably the result of confusion or misinformation as opposed to ill-intent.

This makes sense for some very concrete practical reasons: voting as a noncitizen is already illegal, and the consequences are dire. Punishment includes prison time and deportation, which seems like a rather poor trade-off in exchange for a single, solitary vote in an election, particularly in a presidential election where tens of millions participate.

This is also one of the relatively few crimes where the perpetrator is expected to sign their full name and address to do it, and where it is quite easy to check if they’ve committed the offense.

Johnson is pushing to solve a problem that does not exist, but the reasons go beyond simple political posturing. The speaker has constantly demanded why the Democrats wouldn’t simply go along with the provision when everyone can agree that noncitizens should not be voting in federal elections. The reason is that every “election integrity” effort Donald Trump and his allies undertake inevitably ends up targeted at making voting itself more difficult, particularly for the folks they don’t really want voting.

Voter identification efforts, moves to block mail-in ballots and absentee voting, voter roll purges, vague post-felony voting provisions and other so-called security and integrity initiatives have really been tailored around controlling who can vote, regardless of their base eligibility.

We have a hard time envisioning a scenario where Republicans introducing additional friction in voter registration and ballot-casting ostensibly to backstop integrity doesn’t get used to stop eligible voters from participating in elections or improperly void their votes.

Of course, the messaging implications cannot be ignored. Trump and the GOP have now spent days pushing the lie that Haitian migrants are roaming around Ohio, eating cats and dogs, one more in a series of falsehoods that have aimed to present immigrants as suspect, dangerous, eroding the stability of American society (when in fact the exact opposite is true).

This voting obsession is also an outgrowth of that, and a very sinister one — Trump and Johnson are trying to paint immigrants not only as individually threatening to Americans and their economic prospects, but threatening to the nation’s own democratic order.

This is as much misdirection as anything else, an effort to distract everyone from the fact that it was Trump who tried mightily to overturn this order with his failed 2020 coup attempt. Neither voters nor the media should buy it. Pass the funding, Speaker Johnson, without poison pills.

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