Cleta Mitchell Calls on Congress to Pass a ‘Super SAVE Act’

Cleta Mitchell is urging Congress to pass a “Super SAVE ACT” — a turbo-charged version of the massive voter suppression bill approved by the U.S. House earlier this year.

Mitchell, the far-right lawyer and anti-voting activist who played a key role in President Donald Trump’s failed bid to subvert the 2020 election, addressed a rainy Capitol Hill rally organized by the right-wing Tea Party Patriots Wednesday, part of an effort to pressure lawmakers to pass the SAVE Act.

“I think we need a Super SAVE Act,” Mitchell told a sparse crowd of about two dozen people. “We need to actually strengthen the bill that’s already passed the House.”

Mitchell said the stronger measure should “codify the work that is being done by the Department of Homeland Security, where they will review your voter rolls for free for a state and identify any non-citizens so those can be removed.”

“We need to make it possible for every state to have their voter rolls reviewed to remove non-citizens,” Mitchell added.

Mitchell also took the chance to level an attack on Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.

“If you’re against honesty, integrity, then what are you for? Corruption,” she said. “And we have a whole segment of people in this country — not a majority, thank goodness, but a very small minority — and I’m gonna just start calling them for what they are. They are the corrupt elections crowd and they are led by corrupt lawyers like corrupt Marc Elias.”

“They are corrupt, corrupt, corrupt,” Mitchell continued. “They want to corrupt our elections. They have done that and we are not going to put up with it anymore.”

“Trump’s favorite election denying lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, gives me a big shout out at her voter suppression rally,” Elias wrote on social media, posting video of Mitchell’s remarks. “I wear their scorn like a badge of honor.”

The House passed the SAVE Act in April, since when the bill has been stalled in the Senate, where Democrats have signaled that they will filibuster it. The measure — the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history — would require documentary proof of citizenship for anyone registering to vote, among other provisions.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), who sponsored the SAVE Act in the House, said that the Senate should be held “accountable” for not passing the bill. 

“We should demand that we get it through and we should hold the Senate accountable,” Roy said. “Majority Leader [John] Thune should bring it to a vote again, and again, and again to demonstrate that Republicans are serious about protecting our country and the right to vote for every citizen.”

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, told supporters in June that the group plans to convince lawmakers to attach the SAVE Act to a must-pass piece of legislation this fall — likely either a continuing budget resolution or the National Defense Authorization Act.

Launched not long after former President Barack Obama took office, Tea Party Patriots has a record of mobilizing large numbers of conservative voters, and enjoys relationships with key Republican lawmakers. Martin was among the conservative leaders who spoke at a press conference led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) last year to promote an earlier version of the SAVE Act.

In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), along with Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said that they would “object to any attempt to add the SAVE Act or other anti-voter legislation” to any must-pass bill in the Senate. 

“The SAVE Act uses President Trump’s election conspiracy theories to impose new federal mandates on states that would create major barriers to voter registration for millions of eligible American voters,” the senators said. “It is wrong, un-American, and we will use all tools at our disposal to oppose efforts to ram it through the Senate contained in unrelated legislation.”

Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who served as Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, suggested that people who can’t speak English should be stopped from registering to vote, since they probably aren’t citizens. 

Cuccinnelli attacked a provision of the For the People Act, a failed Democratic-backed measure to protect and expand voting rights, that made it a crime to hinder another person from registering to vote. 

“They created this vague new crime for state and local officials who might interfere with people’s ability to vote, by which they were targeting that person at the DMV who sees someone that has checked the citizenship box but they can’t speak English, so they probably aren’t a U.S. citizen,” Cuccinelli said. “Having sworn in U.S. citizens, there’s an English-learning component to that requirement. So that’s a pretty good clue.”

CJ Pearson, co-chair of the RNC Youth Council, said that he’s organizing young Republicans to pressure the Senate to pass the SAVE Act because he’s “not going to allow someone from some third-world country to third-world my America.” 

“I love what Cleta said, let’s pass the SAVE Act,” Pearson said. “But then let’s pass the Super SAVE Act, then let’s pass the Super Super SAVE Act. Because there is nothing we should be unwilling to do to ensure the American people have faith in the elections of our country.”