'It's An Awful Act': Mark DeSaulnier Torches SAVE Act, Says It Is About 'Disenfranchising People'

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During a town hall on Wednesday, Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA) was asked about Democratic support for the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Transcript

00:00The next question is from Desiree. Why would any Democrat vote for the SAVE Act?

00:09Why didn't anybody?

00:11Why would any Democrat vote for the SAVE Act?

00:14I don't know why they would. I mean, it's an awful act. It's fortunately not going to get the votes in the Senate,

00:20but it's about disenfranchising people and making it harder for people to vote.

00:24And I think that's about as un-American as you can get.

00:27But we want informed voters, but we also want to make it easy for people to vote.

00:32It's, you know, people have two jobs, a lot of demands on their time.

00:37We want to make it easy for people to be informed and to vote.

00:40What could be more American than that?

00:42So I don't know why anyone would vote for that. It was a horrible bill.

00:45I will say on that subject matter, there are people in the Congress and in this country

01:00who do make the argument that we're not a democracy, that we're a republic.

01:05And they will usually refer to the founders when the country was founded.

01:09That only white men who own property could vote.

01:14The way I read the founders, and I've done a lot of reading,

01:18is that they believed as literacy rates went up, Franklin in particular,

01:22that people would be able to vote for their representatives.

01:27So that's my argument against this.

01:29But there are people in regards to that question, a lot of these questions,

01:33who think when they convince average voters to vote against their own interests,

01:37they're demonstrating their point, that it's supposed to be a republic in their view,

01:42and a select group of people are supposed to make the decisions.

01:45I don't feel that way. I hope most people don't feel like that.

01:48I believe in everyday voters.

01:52Sometimes they disappoint me recently.

01:55But I ultimately have faith that...

01:58De Tocqueville had many great lines, but when he came and looked at America,

02:01one of his brilliant...

02:02I think my favorite line for De Tocqueville was,

02:05as he said, when he went back to Europe to explain what was happening in America in the late 1800s,

02:10he says, America was founded, is founded on a simple premise,

02:15that you can expect extraordinary things from ordinary people.

02:21Not always.

02:23And I guess you could say extraordinary could be taken two ways,

02:26but I think in De Tocqueville's message, it was aspirational.

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