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MAGA's "pasta pass" talking point is height of gaslighting
They know better. They're hoping voters don't.
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It looks like Republicans settled on a talking point about why the SAVE America Act is totally necessary to stop non-citizens from fraudulently voting by the millions and zillions — and you will not be surprised to learn that it is hilariously stupid.
Yes, it’s time to talk about the Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Pass, the latest thing that Republicans have settled on as justification for the voter ID requirements in President Trump’s signature election suppression bill.
Ground zero for this nonsense seems to have been White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson going on Newsmax last week to discuss how she saw a tweet from Olive Garden about their never-ending pasta deal and that you need ID for it, and she just got to thinking, “Olive Garden takes pasta pass security more seriously than Democrats take election security.”
Republican House members dutifully picked up and parroted this nonsense, with Rep. Steve Scalise appearing on CNBC to give his deep thoughts, Rep. David Kustoff racing to Newsmax to share the good news about pasta security, and Rep. Virginia Foxx going on the House floor to push this as a reason to vote in favor of the bill.
This isn’t new, of course — well, the pasta part is, but not Republicans alighting on some random thing they think you need ID to buy and then declaring that should mean you need one to vote.
Trump has spent several years telling people that because you need an ID to go to the grocery store, you should need an ID to vote, and he recently expanded this keen analysis: “All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID.”
Of course, you do not need an ID to go to a grocery store or get gas, but you can understand Trump’s confusion given that he’s probably never done either of these things for himself.
Rep. Bryan Steil no doubt thought he’d hit on a big old gotcha by sharing, during a floor debate on the SAVE Act earlier this year, that he went to buy beer and the clerk carded him, even though she knew him and even though he is 44, so therefore we need voter ID: “I think it’s nuts that we protect our beer in this country more than our ballots in jurisdictions.”
The problem for Steil, of course, is that laws vary widely across the country as to how we “protect our beer,” just as they do for our ballots.
There are so many ways these arguments are wrongheaded that it is impossible to know where to start. But we’ll give it a shot.
There’s no constitutional right to penne
The simplest — and biggest — reason that requiring an ID to buy pasta or groceries or gas or beer, or anything really, is not the same as requiring an ID to vote is that buying pasta or groceries or gas or beer is not a sacred Constitutional right that shall not be abridged. Voting, however, is. We have, like, multiple constitutional amendments about it.
The Fifteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War, extended the right to vote to Black men, though that right was largely theoretical until the modern civil rights era abolished the many strategies states used to keep Black people out of the voting booth. The Nineteenth Amendment extended the vote to women. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment banned poll taxes — one of those many voter suppression strategies. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to 18.
The government can’t impose conditions that severely burden your right to vote. In contrast, Olive Garden is allowed to deny or abridge or entirely cancel your access to pasta.