While the House has advanced the election integrity bill, the Senate is another story. House Republicans are divided on it as the president renews his advocacy.
WASHINGTON—The SAVE America Act, which would require voter ID in elections and citizenship verification in voter registration, has a champion in President Donald Trump, who has refused to sign a major housing bill until the Senate advances the election integrity legislation.
Yet, the prospects of passage anytime soon seem to be dimming.
The measure, which polling suggests is popular with many Americans, has already made it through the House of Representatives. It has stalled in the Senate for months.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has faced Republican defectors on the bill and resisted a risky procedural maneuver that the bill’s proponents believe could deliver a victory. Those considerations have not assuaged the diehard SAVE advocates.
The Senate’s departure for a multi-week recess escalated tensions as Congress mulls supplemental defense spending, the farm bill, and other legislation that could lose steam if SAVE dominates business.
Some House Republicans are demanding that their Senate colleagues act, criticizing Thune and other GOP colleagues in the upper chamber and even raising the specter of delays in the House.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) had a message for Thune on SAVE.
“Put it on the floor and debate it. Make them debate and tell the American people why they don’t have the votes,” he said.
Clyde and other members of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction in the chamber, held a June 25 press conference calling on the Senate to pass the legislation.
Other Republicans have warned of the possible downsides of a full-bore push on the act ahead of the midterms.
“You’re setting up here for a big disappointment on something that nobody thinks will happen. It will not happen, because it’s easy to filibuster to the end of the year,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) told The Epoch Times.
Meanwhile, although the act itself was found to violate a key rule governing budget reconciliation, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has floated incorporating a SAVE-like grant program into a third such bill this Congress, which would enable Republicans to advance their priorities with a simple majority in the Senate.
Yet the prospect of more reconciliation this Congress—and the scope of a grant program in matching the expectations around SAVE America—has also drawn skepticism from lawmakers.
