We'd all love to see the SAVE America Act signed into law. If any bill should pass easily, this is the one. Yet the odds of passage look worse by the week. But Democrats' obstruction with the filibuster is only half the story. Wobbly Republicans in the Senate are the other half, and Republicans who want to make it happen are looking for any way possible to make it work. Some have seemed more promising than others, but we’ve still ended up back in the same spot.
Now, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) says he has a plan to get it done. But will it work?
Johnson wants to fold the SAVE America Act into a budget reconciliation package that also carries $350 billion for the Pentagon, along with other spending priorities. The filibuster doesn't apply to reconciliation bills, which means that Senate Democrats couldn't block this one the way they've blocked everything else. The catch is that Johnson also has to win over Republican holdouts in his own chamber, and so far, he hasn't.
"What we're planning to do is send over a bill that will be irresistible for any Republican," Johnson said on Fox News Sunday. "Every Republican would vote for that if packaged correctly, and that's what we're planning to do right now."
That's the pitch.
The fine print is messier.
House Republicans have floated adding a $4 billion grant program to push states toward voter ID requirements and citizenship verification for every voter, but nobody knows whether the Senate parliamentarian would allow that provision in a reconciliation bill. Punchbowl also reports that the holdouts would likely demand tens of billions of dollars in cuts to social programs, and cuts that deep won't win over moderate Republicans, let alone Democrats, especially with the midterms just four months away.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said in June that he was skeptical a third reconciliation package could pass the Senate at all. He’s probably right.
Meanwhile, the lower chamber entered an early recess on Tuesday after 14 Republicans voted against a procedural measure to debate attaching the SAVE America Act to the National Defense Authorization Act. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) demanded that Johnson write the bill directly into the NDAA's text. At the same time, Johnson pushed for a process known as "MIRVing," which bundles unrelated bills into one package. Luna argued that MIRVing would let the Senate strip the SAVE America Act entirely. Johnson countered that the Senate could just as easily strip it from the NDAA text.
President Donald Trump has tried to break the logjam. He met with Johnson on June 25 to work through the standoff, and on Thursday that week, he posted on Truth Social, urging Republicans to unite and stop voting against procedural rules. Meanwhile, the Senate went into recess early on June 25, one day after Senate Republicans sat through a tense lunch with Trump, who pressured them to pass the bill.
Not a single senator objected to the early adjournment.
Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said the Senate should cancel its recess and pass the SAVE America Act, but Thune and other Republicans said the votes weren't there. And there's another complication. Johnson's version of the bill doesn't include a full ban on mail-in ballots, even though Trump has repeatedly said he won’t support the SAVE America Act without one. Johnson believes Trump would accept the bill anyway. Personally, I’d be okay with leaving that out for now if it means getting the two key elements of the bill (proof of citizenship to register to vote and a valid ID to vote in a federal election) actually done. I think even Trump would tolerate it.
But let's be honest here. When a piece of common-sense legislation with widespread support can't pass on its own merits, there's little reason to believe that procedural tricks will succeed where the merits failed. Johnson deserves credit for trying every tool in the box, but we’ve seen this movie before, and barring some new plot twist that completely changes the story, I think we know how this latest effort will end.
