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.
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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.