WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has been singularly focused on pressuring congressional Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill he claims is needed to secure elections.
Despite pressure from the president as well as several House and Senate Republicans — and weeks spent debating the bill on the Senate floor — it lacks the necessary support to clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the upper chamber. Trump has called for eliminating the filibuster altogether to pass the legislation, but Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has said his caucus is “not even close” to having the votes to do that.
Trump continues to pressure Republicans to pass the bill, and House Republican leaders are looking for new ways to force the bill through after a group of conservatives began holding up all other floor action.
The bill would overhaul federal elections by requiring voter ID at the polls and proof of citizenship to register to vote.
It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and the practice occurs rarely. Federal law requires that voters registering to vote swear under penalty of perjury that they are citizens and eligible to vote.
The House Republican Plan
House Republicans plan to pass components of the SAVE America Act through a $95 billion party-line spending bill they started work on on Wednesday.
The process, known as reconciliation, allows Republicans to bypass the Senate filibuster and pass legislation without any Democratic support. This would be the third reconciliation bill since Trump returned to office last year.
There’s one problem: Reconciliation bills have to be related to taxes and spending. So not all provisions of the SAVE America Act can pass this way. The Senate’s nonpartisan referee, known as the parliamentarian, will decide which provisions qualify.
House Republicans on Wednesday released the budget blueprint for this process, which includes instructions for committees on how much they can spend in the final bill. The House Administration Committee would be granted $10 billion to implement elements of the SAVE America Act. That committee will decide which ones to try to pass through reconciliation.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has insisted that the only way to ensure the SAVE America Act becomes law is to include it in the reconciliation process. Leaving a meeting with Vice President JD Vance and House Republicans on Wednesday night, Johnson said, “We’re going to pass the Save America Act into law, as much of that as possible.”
Thune sounded more cautious about how much could be done through reconciliation. “We’ve looked at that at length,” he said Thursday, “and there are some things you could do, but are they going to be sufficient to scratch the itch of the people who want the full SAVE Act?”
Grants to states, for example, could potentially get through, he said.
The budget blueprint that Republicans released on Wednesday must be adopted by both the House and the Senate for work to start on the final reconciliation package.
The SAVE Act or the SAVE America Act?
Last year, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE Act. The bill never gained traction in the Senate.
On Feb. 11, the House passed an expanded version of the bill at Trump’s urging called the SAVE America Act, on a 218-213 vote.
The SAVE Act had two main provisions:
- Requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
- Requiring states to establish a program to remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls, by submitting them to the federal SAVE database, and allowing American citizens to sue election officials who don’t follow proof-of-citizenship requirements.
The SAVE America Act includes those provisions and adds a third:
- Requiring photo identification to vote in federal elections.
Democrats and even some Republicans oppose both versions of the bill. Millions of people do not have access to passports or birth certificates and could be disenfranchised by the requirement to prove citizenship to register to vote.
Inaccurate claims by Trump
Trump has claimed that the SAVE America Act would end mail-in voting in a variety of situations and impose new limits on transgender people. The current version of the bill does neither.
As recently as his Fourth of July speech, Trump said there would be “no mail-in ballots except for illness, disability, military deployment, or travel” under the SAVE America Act.
The bill does not include a provision to ban mail-in ballots. It does add rules for getting mail-in ballots; applicants who submit a mail voter registration form would need to present documentary proof of citizenship in person at an election office.
Last month, Trump posted on Truth Social that the “Full version” of the legislation had two additional provisions: “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS” and “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION SURGERY FOR OUR CHILDREN.”
The bill does not include any provisions related to women’s sports or gender transition surgeries.
Will this affect the November elections?
Proponents of the bill, particularly Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, say that Congress would need to pass the SAVE America Act by early August for it to be implemented before the midterm elections in November.
But Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who is retiring at the end of this term and opposes the bill, told reporters Wednesday that there’s no way to implement the bill in time for the midterms.
“Do y’all have any idea how many governmental entities have to implement these changes before November? More than 10,000. …If we had passed this last year, it couldn’t have been implemented in time,” Tillis told reporters.
“They’re being disingenuous to suggest to the American people they could possibly be operational by this election. And so then it begins to make me wonder ... if we’re just beginning to undermine the underlying integrity of any of our elections,” Tillis continued. “And I think that’s dangerous, and I think it’s wrong.”
