Senate Republican leaders are unlikely to hold additional votes on the SAVE America Act, the voter ID and proof of citizenship bill many Republicans say has done more harm to the party than good.
Now, even the bill’s most outspoken GOP supporters are acknowledging that another drawn-out Senate floor debate would be a futile exercise.
But the Senate’s tabling of SAVE will only anger the party’s base and intensify the long-shot push to scrap the filibuster. This issue has become a major point of contention between President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
“I completely understand my colleagues who want to maintain the filibuster. We all want to maintain the filibuster, honestly,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said. “But I know the Democrats won’t. That’s the only division here.”
It’s exactly the type of conversation GOP leaders don’t want to be having as they’re staring down an election-year legislative pileup.
The details. Reopening the SAVE debate on the floor would require another procedural vote at a simple-majority threshold. Doing so would pre-empt more urgent Republican priorities, such as reconciliation and FISA.
There’s also a new wrinkle: The most recent SAVE-related vote, which occurred during a vote-a-rama last month, fell just short of 50 votes. To Senate GOP leaders, that alone is a good enough reason to move on.
Many of the most vocal SAVE America Act supporters now agree, pointing to the rejected vote-a-rama amendment as proof they need a new strategy.
“We had a test vote. It failed,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said. “So we’ve got to rethink what that means.”
Next steps. Johnson said the vote-a-rama effort was a “good exercise” but noted it proved that gutting the filibuster is the only way to pass the SAVE Act. Only a fraction of GOP senators support this, despite Trump’s constant prodding.
But Johnson has been telling colleagues they should be concerned they’re not doing enough to push for the bill given how intensely it has animated the GOP base.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) believes it would be a mistake to shelve the bill. While GOP leaders say it already served a political purpose by forcing Democrats to vote against a narrow voter ID amendment, Schmitt noted that the full proposal, which he co-authored, has languished.
“We’ve not voted on it. So I think we need to spend the requisite time on it and then … let the chips fall as they may as far as seeing where people are at,” Schmitt said. “The expectation among a lot of people is that we would do that.”
Thune’s position. Despite GOP frustration, Thune’s job isn’t in any jeopardy. In fact, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) — the SAVE Act’s most ardent proponent — said last week that Thune “is beloved by colleagues and very popular within the conference.” The odds of a Thune ouster, Lee added, are “literally 0 in 100,000.”
That doesn’t mean the SAVE fight, and its impact on the Trump-Thune relationship, will vanish.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told us he’ll force another vote on the SAVE America Act during the second vote-a-rama for the reconciliation bill this month.
