A pair of congressional Republicans say they will push to overturn a bill passed last year by the D.C. Council that would allow non-citizens — including undocumented immigrants — to vote in local elections starting in 2024.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) said Thursday that they will introduce a resolution to disapprove the bill, employing a mechanism that Congress has to weigh in on or toss out any bill passed by the council.

“Allowing illegal immigrants to vote is an insult to every voter in America,” said Cotton in a statement.

The moves comes the same week that Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) introduced a separate measure that would do much the same. That follows a similar bill he pushed last year, when Republicans were in the minority.

“If you’re in the United States illegally, you don’t have the right to vote — period. Liberals in Washington, D.C. who want to allow noncitizens to vote are putting the integrity of our election system at risk. Americans deserve confidence in our elections and to know that only legal citizens are voting in the United States of America,” he said then.

The council passed the bill in mid-October, after years of similar measures gaining no traction among lawmakers. Proponents say that non-citizens pay taxes and are impacted by local decisions, and should thus have a right to weigh in on who represents them at the local level. Maryland towns Takoma Park and Hyattsville already allow non-citizen legal permanent residents to vote; New York City passed a similar law, but it was overturned by a state court last year. D.C.’s law went a step further than those jurisdictions, though, by extending the franchise to undocumented immigrants.

“I’m sure that Sen. Cotton and Rep. Comer do not think that Congress should be able to make and override the laws of Arkansas and Kentucky. And yet they think they should be able to dictate the laws for 700,000 law-abiding residents of the District of Columbia and deny us the right to govern ourselves. This is exactly why Congress must finally make the District of Columbia the 51st state,” said Councilmember Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1), who authored the bill.

“The law they are seeking to disapprove allows for local residents to vote in local elections on matters that affect them directly, and does not apply to federal elections. I am in favor of giving people representation in the matters that affect them,” she added.

After four years of Democratic control of the House, D.C. is facing increasing threats from an emboldened conservative majority in the chamber. Under a new set of rules passed by House Republicans, rank-and-file members will have the ability to attach amendments to spending bills, raising the prospect that some will try and insert provisions that target specific D.C. laws or programs. Longstanding budget riders prevent D.C. from subsidizing abortions for low-income women or legalizing the sales of recreational marijuana.

Some of the chamber’s most conservative members have floated an even more dramatic proposal to repeal the home rule that D.C. has had for almost 50 years.

Still, with Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, D.C. will have something of a backstop to some of the Republican ploys. That may well be the case with Cotton and Comer’s disapproval resolution, which would require support from both the House and Senate during the 30-day congressional review period that is expected to end March 8. (Every bill passed by the council undergoes the review period.) No disapproval resolution has been passed by Congress in decades.

Still, Cotton’s statement seemed to indicate that he wanted to use the resolution as a political tool against Democrats. “Every single Democrat should be on the record about whether they support this insane policy,” he said.

Cotton has long been a foe of D.C. residents and lawmakers, opining in 2020 that D.C. wasn’t as deserving of statehood as Wyoming (which is smaller), largely because of the latter state’s “well-rounded working class” and D.C.’s lack of miners and loggers. (A year later, another Republican took the argument a step further, saying D.C.’s lack of a car dealership was disqualifying for the purposes of statehood.) Cotton also pushed against D.C.’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for school kids, calling it “insane and cruel” and yet another reason “D.C. should never be a state.”

Should the council’s bill survive Cotton and Comer’s disapproval resolution, non-citizens will only be allowed to vote in local races. As such, they will not be able to vote for the senators that D.C. does not have.