The House this week is set to take up the SAVE America Act (the SAVE Act 2.0), an election-integrity measure that some Senate Republicans can’t seem to get behind even though the vast majority of Americans already have.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s office confirms the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register and photo identification to vote in federal elections, will hit the floor on Tuesday. While Democrats will spend hours making a mockery of truth and reality in opposing it, the legislation is expected to pass mostly along party lines — as the original SAVE Act did in the House some 300 days ago.
But as the House prepares to send another bill aimed at protecting federal elections from fraud, the GOP-led Senate can’t seem to get its act together. Why? Because the sad state of affairs is that some Republican senators need to be talked into moving on the SAVE Act or its successor.
“We have to convince our colleagues that this is a popular enough piece of legislation, one we have to pass,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told The Federalist Monday afternoon before heading into a meeting with a parliamentary expert to discuss the path and pitfalls of the so-called “talking filibuster.”
‘Something That’s Worthy of Passing’
As The Federalist reported last week, Republicans could take the “silent filibuster” off the table. Democrats would certainly use the passive-aggressive form of bill-killing. Republicans — with a 53-47 majority — definitely don’t have the 60 votes necessary to invoke cloture and move the election-reform bill to the floor for a majority vote; sources say the majority might not have enough votes to meet a simple majority threshold.
Existing Senate rules, however, open the door for the “talking filibuster,” meaning Senate Democrats would be forced to keep debating/talking to stall a vote. Eventually, liberals who hate the idea of voter ID would run out of things to say or talk as long as the rules allow. Each Democrat would have two opportunities to speechify, old-school filibuster style. Once they’re done, they’re done. No timeouts. No dinner breaks. No pee breaks. Straight debate to explain to the 80 percent of Americans (including a significant number of Democrats) who support citizenship and ID requirements, why they so vehemently oppose basic election integrity. Spoiler alert: Democrats won’t say that they want noncitizens and other ineligible voters to cast ballots in U.S. elections, but they do.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., earlier this month said “the SAVE act is dead on arrival in the Senate and every single Senate Democrat will vote against any bill that contains it.” Schumer spoke too soon. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, proving to be a routine thorn in the side of the far-left Democrat Party, announced his support for the SAVE Act, arguing that voter ID is “not a radical idea.”
The problem, according to congressional sources, is that some Senate Republicans don’t want to put themselves and their colleagues on the other side of the aisle through the Democrats’ expected extended temper tantrum. Johnson said some in his party believe the potential hundreds of hours of Senate debate would squander precious time for other pressing business, a point the Democrat Party’s marketing team in corporate media will dutifully hammer every day of said “debate.”
“They think how difficult it is going to be, and how much can we be assured of success?” the Wisconsin Republican said. “They think, ‘If we take floor time for this, we won’t be able to pass x, y, and z,’ but we’re not going to pass x, y, and z, anyway. So let’s focus on something we can pass, something that’s worthy of passing.”
Senate Democrats have grown quite fond of the filibuster. In the first three-plus months of President Trump’s second term, Democrats employed the silent killer several times, including filibusters to strangle a bill barring men pretending to be women from competing in women’s sports and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would have required medical care for babies born after botched abortions.
In the current session of Congress, 225 cloture motions have been filed as of Feb. 6, according to U.S. Senate records. The Dems’ many filibusters have been the silent type.
Last week, Majority Leader John Thune reportedly said there was “nothing decided” on changing the rules to require a talking filibuster, a proposal the South Dakota Republican said “some” of his Senate colleagues are interested in.
Some GOP senators like Johnson would like to see more bang for the buck out of an election-integrity bill. In essence, if you’re going to go through the trouble of having to listen to the likes of Sen. Cory “Spartacus” Booker drone on in adult diapers for hours at a time, you might as well put some more meat on the bone.
Johnson and Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, the co-author of the bill, met with Trump last week at the White House to discuss bill language. Trump wants to eliminate mail-in voting, while Republicans look to limit it.
“I think we need to tighten up the requirements for absentee voting,” Johnson told Wisconsin Public Radio last week. “I’m opposed to mail in register or mail in balloting.”
Popular Enough to Pass?
Some Republicans apparently would like the legislation to go away. Leadership can always blame the Senate’s onerous rules and procedures for making it disappear.
Michael Brown, conservative talk show host and former FEMA director under President George W. Bush, said it’s the performative game of the lazy U.S. Senate.
“‘[W]e’ll [Republicans] let the Democrats play their games, and we’ll play our games, and we’ll go on Fox News, and we’ll talk about how … ‘[w]e really wanted to do this, but you know we can’t because if we do, then Democrats are going to filibuster,’” Brown said Saturday on his national weekend show. It’s the usual “machinations that the Republicans are going through trying to avoid a debate, trying to avoid a vote,” he added.
Of course, there are the usual RINOs, Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, who think it “uncivil” to upset their friends on the left. The SAVE Act introduced in the Senate last year garnered 49 Republican co-sponsors. Collins and Murkowski are not on that list. Neither answered The Federalist’s emails on Monday asking whether they support the SAVE and SAVE America acts, and whether they would vote for the bills or back the “talking filibuster.”
John Cornyn, Texas’ senior senator, as his office notes, is a “longtime cosponsor of the SAVE Act and the Save America Act.” But Brown asserts Cornyn doesn’t want the bills to come up for a vote. Congressional sources have told The Federalist the same.
A Cornyn spokeswoman tells The Federalist that the Republican would vote in favor of the bill “should a vote occur in the Senate — something he has called on Leader Thune to do.”
“I hope the U.S. Senate will take up and pass this legislation, and I and others have been discussing it with the Majority Leader,” Cornyn said in a press release.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, chairman of the Rules Committee, is conspicuously missing from the aforementioned cosponsor list. Asked the same questions, a McConnell spokesman directed The Federalist to the former majority leader’s April op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. In the piece, McConnell warned that Trump’s election integrity executive order, which includes citizenship verification, “carries grave risks” for the country.
“Even a targeted federal mandate to strengthen election integrity today could make it easier for a future Democratic president and Congress to use more sweeping mandates to carry out a complete federal takeover of American elections,” the op-ed asserts.
Contrary to the uniparty claims, the SAVE Act and its enhancement would not “federalize” elections; they would fix grievous errors contained in very flawed election laws passed by Congress and signed by both Democrat and Republican presidents.
Yet, here we are. As Johnson says, Senate Republicans who give a damn about election integrity have to “convince” their colleagues that legislation obviously in line with the interests of the American people “is popular enough” to pass.
