Senate Republicans Tee Up Losing Fight Over SAVE America Act

Republican senators are gearing up for a marathon debate over a bill that would amp up ID and proof of citizenship requirements to cast ballots around the country.

The legislation, known as the SAVE America Act, doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate. But it’s President Donald Trump’s top priority — he has promised not to sign any other legislation until it passes. And he and other supporters of the bill are pushing other Republicans to consider the unpalatable option of blowing up Senate rules to do it.

“I think [Trump] understands that we need to put in an aggressive effort here,” Sen. Mike Lee, the Senate’s main driver of passing the bill. “I think the extent of his satisfaction with the process will depend on how, whether, in his view, we gave it everything we had.”

The issue, however, is that Republicans may not have the 60 votes needed to cut off debate in order to pass it. Most Republican senators support the legislation, but not enough of them want to overturn the filibuster to do it.

This is a political headache for Majority Leader John Thune, who has said he’ll bring up the bill for a vote early this week. Thune has committed to the vote, and while he supports the legislation, he said he won’t change the filibuster as Lee and others have called for.

“The votes aren’t there for the talking filibuster,” Thune said last week. “It’s just a reality, and I’m the person who has to deliver, sometimes, the not so good news that the math doesn’t add up.”

Thune and Trump spoke about the SAVE America Act on Monday, Trump told reporters.

“I hope John Thune can get it across the line,” Trump said. “He’s trying. I mean, he told me this morning, I spoke to him, he’s trying.”

The politics around the underlying legislation have also become increasingly fraught as Trump has pushed to add a provision that would eliminate mail-in voting with few exceptions and unrelated measures that would ban gender-affirming procedures for minors and restrict transgender women’s participation in women’s sports.

When asked last week if Trump calling for more additions to the bill made its politics more complicated, Thune demurred.

“You kind of have to be flexible in this business, and so the additional requests that he has added, we are looking at how to accommodate his request to get votes,” Thune said last week. “That’s all part of the discussion we’re still having, but hopefully that’ll get more, I would say, clarified in terms of what the actual procedure looks like next week, in the next couple of days.”

Thune is expected to begin the debate process on Tuesday afternoon, according to a senior Republican source. Republicans are hoping to take the time over the course of the week to sell the legislation. Democrats are expected to use floor time to criticize the legislation and explain their concerns about the bill’s impact. The marathon debate session is expected to go late into the night throughout the week.

“Heck, yeah!” Sen. Katie Britt, another key Trump ally who supports the legislation, said Thursday when a reporter asked if Republicans have plans to hold the Senate floor for an extended amount of time.

Thune will still cut off debate at some point and call for a vote, at which point the bill would need 60 votes to pass — a threshold Republicans don’t expect to meet. In the meantime, Thune is facing increasing pressure from Trump and his base — who have little patience for glacial Senate procedures and upholding norms — as they push him to overturn the filibuster. Thune recently referred to the ire from the online right aimed at him over the SAVE America Act as a product of a “paid influencer ecosystem.”

That pressure has created a rift inside the Senate Republican conference. Some, including Lee, want to vote on changing the filibuster rules at the end of the planned long debate on the SAVE bill. Even if that vote does happen, currently most Republican senators believe in maintaining the filibuster as is. But the SAVE America Act proponents are hoping the whole process will age poorly for Democrats by forcing them to come out publicly against the provisions in the legislation and as proponents of the filibuster, which they’ve wanted to end in the past.

Sen. Ron Johnson, another of the chief backers of the SAVE America Act, said the filibuster makes little sense in the Senate’s current political environment.

“What’s so sacrosanct about the way the Senate operates now?” Johnson said about his support for ending the filibuster. “It’s a completely broken institution. Again, this comes from somebody, it’d be nice if the filibuster worked. It has certainly stopped a lot of really bad Democrat bills in the past. But I think it’s over.”

The high-profile fight has caused at least one senator in the throes of a tough primary fight to change their calculus. Republican Sen. John Cornyn, a longtime filibuster supporter, said last week he would now support ending it to pass the SAVE America Act.

Cornyn said the filibuster, along with other Senate procedures, aren’t what most voters care about when it comes to Congress.

“I think what they want and expect from us is results, and that’s what Democrats are preventing us from delivering,” said Cornyn. “So we’ll continue to look at other rules and precedents and see if there’s some way to make some progress.”