Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman said Tuesday that experience in Wisconsin and Georgia showed that voter ID requirements were not “the end of the world.”
The House of Representatives passed the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship for voter registration and photo ID for voting, on Feb. 11 by a 216-213 vote, sending it to the Senate, where it faces a tough road for passage due to united Democratic opposition, including from Fetterman. “Mornings with Maria” host Maria Bartiromo asked Fetterman about his party’s opposition to the measure.
“Well, there’s a lot to unpack in this about the Save Act and now, it’s not been a serious conversation because right now there’s not a Democratic co-sponsor for that, and that’s why, because that’s necessary because of the filibuster, and that’s also part of history to unpack,” Fetterman told Bartiromo. “We as all the Democrats, we wanted to eliminate the filibuster. We called to eliminate the filibuster, and now we find ourselves that we love it now and that reminds people that the filibuster is important about bringing on the other parts of to have a conversation.”
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“And now for me there’s other parts of SAVE Act that’s been problematic for Democrats, but for me as a Democrat, just fundamentally at the end of the day showing basic, basic, ID to vote is a very reasonable idea, and I think 84% of Americans in the last polling from Pew supports that and Wisconsin, a very, very purple state, just less than a year ago, they put that in their constitution and that was passed nearly by a two-to-one margin, too,” Fetterman continued.
Claims from Democrats that black voters would be disenfranchised appear to not even be gaining traction among black voters and members of the party. CNN data reporter Harry Enten noted high levels of support for voter ID requirements among black voters and Democrats, with at least 70% of both subsets of the general population backing the proposal, during a Feb. 3 appearance on “CNN News Central.”
“I’m a Democrat that’s not going to freak out, you know,” Fetterman said. “The world didn’t end. What happened in Wisconsin, and now in Georgia, for example, Georgia, which I think skews red, I think we’d agree, and after the law they elected two Democrat senators.”
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia defeated Herschel Walker in a Dec. 2022 runoff election, securing his reelection to a full six-year term after the passage of new election integrity legislation. In Wisconsin, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin narrowly won reelection in the state, which has had a voter ID law on the books for years.
Some Republicans have called for forcing Democrats to engage in a “talking filibuster” in order to secure passage of the SAVE Act, which gained the support of moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, enabling it to pass a straight up-or-down vote.
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