‘Going to Do Everything I Can’

Politico has a new piece out today reporting on a quiet, but apparently universally known, concern among Republicans in Congress: that the mail-in voting restrictions that President Trump is attempting to bully everyone into passing ahead of the midterms do not even have the votes they need in the House, let alone the Senate.

I’ll get into the details of the Politico piece more in a moment, but the reporting reminded me of a coverage point that TPM was on earlier this year, just after the SAVE America Act passed the House back in February.

There have been several versions of the SAVE Act. The legislation was originally written by Republicans during the Biden administration as then-candidate Trump’s allies in Congress looked for ways to manufacture a voter fraud-related rationale to point to if Trump lost the 2024 presidential election. The Republican Party regularly invoked the myth of en masse non-citizens voting, the hysteria-inducing narrative that stuck as Trump’s allies prepped for a possible Big Lie 2.0 in the event of another Trump loss in 2024.

That, of course, did not happen. But House Republicans still passed the original version of the SAVE Act during the Biden administration to make a point. It did not go anywhere in the Senate and when Trump won the election, all the non-citizen voting delirium fell by the wayside, along with any other claims of rampant voter fraud. How could there be fraud in 2024 if Trump won?

But now that he is back in power and out for vengeance, Trump has used a lot of his time back in office re-litigating the 2020 election, including tasking several officials, across various departments, to investigate different aspects of the 2020 election. That’s why we’ve seen a raid on the election hub in Fulton County, Georgia and other federal law enforcement actions in other areas of the country that were the target of conspiracy theories in 2020. He’s also worried about the midterms and is trying to bully the Senate into passing another version of the SAVE Act that does not have the votes to pass the upper chamber — and he’s derailing his own agenda in the process.

As I mentioned, earlier this year, TPM was closely covering the aftermath of the House’s passage of the SAVE America Act and Trump’s early efforts to try to convince Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to blow up filibuster rules in order to get the legislation over the finish line.

The SAVE America Act is an updated version of the SAVE Act. It comes with all the same documentary proof of citizenship provisions as the first form of the bill and also mandates photo ID for casting a ballot. It calls for states to give their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security to be run through the department’s faulty citizenship verification system. The bill also calls for the overhaul of online registration systems for enrolling to vote by mail. (Another voter suppression bill that has been introduced in the House, the Make Elections Great Again Act, also calls for new prohibitions on universal mail-in voting, and would require people who want to vote by mail to apply in order to receive a ballot.)

All of this is to say that Trump’s demand for “NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPT FOR ILLNESS, DISABILITY, MILITARY, OR TRAVEL!)” is not included in the SAVE America Act that passed the House. After that legislation passed the House in February, Trump began posting on Truth Social about the need to stuff the above ban on mail-in voting, alongside two unrelated anti-trans provisions, into the SAVE America Act.

As House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) navigates the havoc that far-right members of his party are wreaking (confusingly, to try to force the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act that it sent to the upper chamber in February?), one option he’s been mulling is stuffing some of the photo ID and proof of citizenship provisions of the SAVE America Act into other unrelated bills, like the annual defense bill. He’s focusing on those aspects of the SAVE America Act specifically because he knows he does not have the votes for Trump’s mail-in voting bans. Per Politico:

Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded this year.

Instead, Johnson and other House leaders have stuck with an older version of the SAVE America Act that focuses on proof-of-citizenship requirements but otherwise lets states run their elections as they see fit.

“I’m going to do everything I can with the vote tallies that we have,” he said when asked by a POLITICO reporter if a Trump-style approach to mail voting could come to the floor.

“We all do” want to follow Trump’s lead on the issue, Johnson added. “But the mail-in ballot, he’s acknowledged, is a very difficult thing to regulate at the federal level, because different states do it differently.”

This is all a long-winded way of saying, Trump is derailing his own legislative agenda to try to force the Senate to pass a piece of legislation that does not even include all of his demands. Meanwhile, his demands don’t even have the votes in the House.

Doesn’t Matter Bc SAVE America Act Is ‘Dead’

That’s according to retiring lame duck Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who has used his waning days in the Senate to sometimes mildly criticize Trump and some of his Republican colleagues. Criticism of the president by an elected Republican has been rare, to say the least, throughout Trump’s second term.

“Unless they do the work to get to the 60 votes, they know it’s dead, and so all this is theater,” Tillis told The News & Observer. “And honestly, here in North Carolina, or in virtually any state, the ability, if we go back to when we implemented voter ID in North Carolina, it took a year to get everything in place with adequate funding.”

He continued on, calling it a “joke” that anyone (aka Trump) would believe it would be possible to institute such sweeping changes before November:

“Let’s assume you only allow early voting in the month of October,” Tillis said. “Then do you honestly believe that we can have this thing up in 50 states? There’s no funding. There’s no specific implementation instructions … it’s become a joke, in my mind for somebody that’s actually implemented voter ID law, how anybody can look the American voters in the eye and suggest that it could be implemented in time without just causing a huge impact on the elections, and ironically undermine the confidence of it.”

FBI Orders Analysts to Atlanta

In a potential escalation of the administration’s investigation into the 2020 election in Fulton County that I mentioned above, the FBI is sending orders to field offices around the country seeking analysts to come to Atlanta to help evaluate records there, CBS News reported:

According to a memo sent to all field offices and reviewed by CBS News, the Directorate of Intelligence requested “surge support” to Atlanta to assist in what it called FBI Director Kash Patel’s “priority” investigation. The memo did not explicitly discuss the nature of the investigation, but multiple sources confirmed to CBS News the subject of the memo is the 2020 election probe in Fulton County.

Here’s What You Should Read From TPM Today

Kate Riga wraps up her coverage of a Supreme Court term that gifted Republicans most of what they were after: The Supreme Court Let Trump Do Pretty Much Everything He Wanted — Except Mess with the Money

Josh Kovensky reports live from the Great American State Fair. What it lacks in visitors in makes up for in Trump administration grift and corruption: The Great American State Fair’s Main Exhibit Is Trump’s Corruption

Morning Memo examines the congressional inquiry into Trump’s takeover of the 250th celebration of America: Congressional Report Alleges Fraud in Fundraising for ‘Christian Nationalist’ Freedom250

Trump’s executive order attempting to place sweeping and, likely, lawless new restrictions on mail-in voting ahead of the midterms faces another loss in court, per John Light: A Second Judge Blocks Trump’s Attempted Federal Takeover of Vote by Mail

Yesterday, I wrote about how bad Republicans are at pretending they care about the financial pressures that most Americans are currently facing thanks to Trump’s policies and swelling inflation: Surely a Winning Strategy: Republicans Are Trying to Be as Tone Deaf as Possible on Affordability

Yesterday’s Top Story

JD Vance Says the Midterms Will Determine the Future of Birthright Citizenship

What I’m Reading

Olympian Is Indicted After Arrest at Washington’s Reflecting Pool 

Trump Shows New Signs of Midterm Panic as Brutal Polls Hit  

The Onion’s new parody of Alex Jones’ Infowars starts with $100,000 to Sandy Hook families