For months now, the far-right’s desire to pass the SAVE America Act — a voter suppression bill championed by election deniers and President Donald Trump that would require people to provide proof of citizenship and photo ID to be able to vote — has hobbled Republican leadership and their efforts to pass various legislative priorities.
Trump, aided by MAGA lawmakers on Capitol Hill, have slowed down or scuttled attempts to finalize several GOP priorities, in the process torpedoing their own party’s agenda and beclowning colleagues ahead of what is expected to be a critical midterm election.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to send the House home for recess early last week as a group of House Republicans, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), brought the House floor to a halt over their discontent with the Senate’s inability to pass the SAVE America Act. That House floor blockade effectively delayed the passage of some of the 2027 fiscal year appropriations bills as well as the annual National Defense Authorization bill.
Now, in what seems to be an effort to shift the conversation, Johnson is, once again, saying congressional Republicans will try to pass the SAVE America Act, which would disenfranchise millions of voters, through the party-line budget reconciliation process.
“The big urgency is to get the SAVE America past. The president has that as a top priority, and so do I,” Johnson said in a Sunday Fox News interview. “We passed it three times in the House. We’re going to try one more time on a budget reconciliation bill, and I think that will be the way to get it through the Senate, and finally, to the president’s desk. So, that’s forthcoming”
Trump and his MAGA allies have been relentlessly pushing for SAVE America’s passage even as many Republicans acknowledge its low chance of success. The push from Trump and proponents of the bill has gone as far as talk of nuking the filibuster and holding the Senate floor hostage for an unforeseeable amount of time to deploy the “talking filibuster.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has balked at that plan.
Trump has also threatened other GOP priorities in an effort to pass the voter suppression bill, the most recent example came when he canceled his own signing ceremony for the overwhelmingly bipartisan housing bill.
Just a week before that, the president threatened to not sign the a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 extension unless the SAVE America Act was attached to it. That led to his own Director of National Intelligence pick Jay Clayton’s confirmation hearing being cancelled in a similarly chaotic — and unproductive for Republicans — fashion last month. And in March, during the Department of Homeland Security-specific shutdown, Trump demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act before making a deal with Democrats to end the partial shutdown.
During that time, Republicans were floating the idea of attaching the voter suppression bill into a party-line budget reconciliation bill alongside funding for ICE enforcement operations. That reconciliation bill passed without the SAVE America Act last month.
Johnson is reviving that idea, hoping for what would be the third GOP reconciliation bill since Trump returned to office. But, as TPM has reported, there is a lot that could go wrong with Johnson’s seemingly simple plan to pass the SAVE America Act in a budget reconciliation.
The biggest being the content of the bill Trump is pushing for.
Every single provision of a law going into reconciliation bills must be directly related to the budget and has to comply with strict budget rules. In its current form, the SAVE America Act — requiring, among other things, that people present proof of citizenship when registering to vote and, if Trump gets his way, the bill could include a near-total ban on mail in ballots — would presumably not meet those rules. It has little to do with budget. Republicans would have to rework the legislation in order to fit some aspect of the SAVE America Act into a reconciliation bill.
“The meat of the Save Act cannot be done in reconciliation unless you’re willing to break the rules of reconciliation,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, told TPM in March.
Kogan explained Republicans could “pay states to voluntarily change their state rules, to do some of the stuff in the Save Act” but they are trying to set “binding national requirements, and that sort of thing is either non budgetary in some cases or merely incidental in other cases” and can’t be addressed in the reconciliation process.
And Trump and the group of far-right lawmakers who are pushing for the voter suppression bill have already said they don’t want a watered down version of the bill.
On top of that, as the past two reconciliation bills Republicans worked on proved, from start to finish the budget reconciliation process takes a significant amount of time and requires almost all Republicans to be onboard in order to be successful. With public intraparty disagreements bringing legislating to a halt, getting everyone on the same page about a watered down SAVE America Act would likely be a tall order.
And there you have exactly what they will try to do.
Good Lord, they aren’t even trying to hide it anymore.
It feels like pure luck that MAGA republicans–including TFG–don’t understand basic civics, let alone the more sophisticated stuff required for this bill. Let’s hope they don’t figure out how to break the rules, @becca656.
I am not sure they will even get the house. The house makeup has weakened at the margins.
It would appear to be the case that they don’t give a fuck about basic civics, or sophisticated stuff. They figure brute force will do the job. Remains to be seen if that works.
If we don’t prosecute these motherfuckers, then fuck this country. It’s a joke.