Summary
A GOP-led procedural vote in the House failed after nine Republicans joined Democrats, halting legislative action for the week.
The vote’s collapse blocked Republican efforts to pass the No Rogue Rulings Act, aimed at limiting federal judges’ power, and the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote.
The failed rule also sought to derail a bipartisan resolution allowing proxy voting for new parents, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
With the rule defeated, Speaker Mike Johnson canceled all remaining votes until Monday evening, stalling key GOP priorities.
Also, most voting rights advocates will point to the 24th Amendment, (arguably rightly) claiming that requiring ID that you must pay the state to acquire constitutes a poll tax.
To explain: when black men got the right to vote after the 15th Amendment was passed, lots of states tried lots of ways to make sure they couldn’t. One thing that was legal was requiring a fee to be paid in order to vote - this had the knock-on effect of making sure poor white people, who often sympathized with and voted with black people, couldn’t vote either. These fees were known as poll taxes, ostensibly to pay the people running the poll and defray the state’s cost of administering the election. Normally this was a nominal amount, but if you were a sharecropper or subsistence farmer who was literally counting half-pennies to get by month to month, the quarter that the poll tax required was enormous. Many states kept these poll taxes in one form or another for decades, and they were declared unconstitutional in 1966 by the SCOTUS in Harper v Virginia Board.
If I wanted a Real ID like this executive order required, I would be paying about $80 on the low end, assuming I do not need to pay to acquire any of the several documents I need to prove I am who I am.