When Republican Senate majority leader John Thune announced on Thursday that he would be bringing the Save America Act to the chamber floor and promised “a full and robust debate” it sounded close to business as usual.
The understatement glossed over the intensifying pressure Thune has endured from president Donald Trump, and the Republican Maga base, to push a series of proposed voting changes through the Senate which would radically alter the voting patterns and procedures across the United States.
The GOP consensus opinion is that the Save America Act must pass. Illinois Democratic representative Delia Ramirez, during a debate on the bill in the House, described the measure as “yet another Republican attempt to suppress and intimidate the votes of anyone who threatens their white supremacist agenda. Don’t take my word for it. Just look for the threats to surround the polls with gun-wielding masked men and it will become clear to you that Trump and Republicans want to control who votes so they can remain in power. It’s just another page from the authoritarian playbook.”
Nobody can accuse Trump of failing to multitask. In addition to prosecuting his war/excursion with Iran and boogeying with Jake Paul, he has spent the week steadily turning the heat up under Thune to work through the Senate an act that a White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described as “one of the most critical pieces of legislation in our nation’s history”.
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“The Save America bill is overwhelmingly popular with all Americans because each provision is rooted in common sense,” she said at Tuesday’s briefing, citing the 2005 bipartisan report chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and James Baker which concluded that “absentee ballots remained the largest source of voter fraud.”
“It’s what the American people elected Republicans to do and they must deliver on it as soon as possible. The president is calling on Congress to get the job done and send this historic piece of legislation to his desk- immediately – for signature.”
The message was delivered to the press corps but intended for Thune and his senatorial colleagues on the Hill.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act has long been on the Trump agenda but the urgency to pass it into law is growing as the GOP eyes the November midterms, and the current polls, with growing trepidation.
In brief, it has five requirements: that voters show a valid form of identification; that they show a proof of citizenship; that mail-in ballots will be limited to members of the military, to voters with disability and to people who can demonstrate that they were travelling on election days. The fourth and fifth requirements play strongly with the Maga base: banning transgender women from competing in women’s sport, and gender reassignment surgery for children – or, as Leavitt phrased it, the act “permanently bans men from competing in women’s sports” and “bans transgender mutilation surgery for children.”
Until this week, Thune had resisted calls to bring the legislation to the floor on the grounds that the Republicans simply do not have the 60 votes required – it would take seven Democrats to cross the aisle. The bill just about squeezed through the House when Texan representative Henry Cueller became the lone Democrat to vote for it. The Republicans have also been exploring ways to force the issue to a traditional “talking” filibuster, through which the Senate majority could simply pass the legislation by a 51-person majority (with vice-president JD Vance providing the decisive vote) once the Democrats had exhausted themselves by speaking against the bill; whether that took days or weeks would not matter.
However Thune said earlier this week that introducing a talking filibuster is “way more complicated and risky than people are assuming at the moment”, incurring further wrath from the right.
The White House has cited a host of polls demonstrating that the majority of Americans approve of voter identity, arguing that the only group against it are elected Democratic politicians. Their opponents cite numerous issues, not least their distrust of the motivations of a president who has consistently denied the results of the 2020 presidential election, and who has linked undocumented immigrants as a key component of manifest election fraud.
The proposed changes are also, they argue, fraught with other difficulties. Driving licenses do not suffice as a form of photo identification. Some 146 million Americans do not own passports. And 69 million married American women now have surnames that do not match the maiden names on their birth certificates. Millions would encounter difficulties in producing adequate paper work.
James Sample, a constitutional law specialist and professor at Holfsta University, presented the Save America Act as an effort to solve a problem that does not exist as he described instances of non-citizen voting as “vanishingly rare.”
“It is statistically almost zero,” he argued on MS Now. “And state after state, audit after audit, including the Trump administration’s own data bear that out. Which is to say, the sleight of hand here is to take the two parts referenced. Voter ID is the part they market.
[ ‘He intends to subvert the elections’: Pressure grows on Donald TrumpOpens in new window ]
“The proof of citizenship is the part that would have impact, an absolutely draconian impact. Twenty one million individuals lack ready access to the documents that would be necessary,” he added, pointing out that because electors across the table would have to verify the authenticity of a sudden deluge of documents, it would cause absolute chaos.
He contended that the “chaos is an end in itself because that end, in turn, becomes a mean for the executive to assert control if the election outcome is not to their liking.”
“It is designed to overwhelm election officials and disenfranchise,” he continued, “and create the kind of ‘well-there-were-all-sorts-of-problems’ that becomes a predicate for aggressive unilateral imperial action.”
The counterview has been advanced from voices including Elon Musk – “It must be done or democracy is dead,” he posted on X recently to John Cornyn, the veteran Texas senator vying with electoral opponent Ken Paxton for Trump’s decisive endorsement.
In a New York Post opinion piece on Tuesday, Cornyn explained to readers – and specifically, to one reader – why he felt that scrapping the filibuster is a price worth paying in order to pass the voting reform.
“Democrats started this fight. Now Republicans should finish it. When 48 Democrats nearly killed the filibuster, it was to pass radical legislation designed to increase election fraud. They tried to ban voter ID requirements, to decriminalise ballot harvesting, and even to send taxpayer dollars into Democrats’ own campaign funds. The Save America Act, which I’ve co-sponsored, would do the opposite. It would make it easy to vote but harder to cheat, by requiring proof of citizenship and voter ID.”
[ Donald Trump is mad, bad and dangerous. Only the midterms can save the US nowOpens in new window ]
The volume of comments to Thune’s post confirming that he will bring the Save America Act to the floor were stark in their demands that he get it done, by hook or crook.
“He’s gotta be a leader. If he’s a leader, he’s got to get ‘em,” Trump said on Wednesday. “It’s the most popular bill I have ever seen put before Congress.”
But how? Thune lacks both the votes for a majority and even the votes to invoke “cloture”, the procedural rule that would permit a bypass to the filibuster tradition. For all the expected noise in the senate chamber next week, the leader is in a bind.
His president may be hosting the greening of the White House on Tuesday, but he will be watching closely.
