The SAVE Act Standoff

A hot debate has now broken out in the Republican Party over the so-called SAVE Act.

Republicans support the SAVE Act, which would force voter ID nationally. Democrats in the Senate have been holding it up.

President Trump correctly points out that the SAVE Act is quite popular with Americans.

“Even the Democrats — you saw the numbers today?— Democrats voted 86% that this stuff should be passed,” he noted. “With the Republicans, you’re at 98%. But Democrats are at 86%, except for the people that run the Democrat Party, because they want to try and win elections illegally. The only reason you vote against voter I.D. is because you want to cheat. There’s no other reason. They come up with reasons; they say it’s racist. That’s their number one: racist. Then they have to explain it, and they’re just sitting there mumbling. They can’t explain it.”

President Trump has also been having fun mocking Chuck Schumer: “It’s the easiest thing we have. Now the problem is you call it the SAVE Act, and nobody knew what the hell the SAVE Act was. … It’s called ‘The Save America Act’. And I saw Schumer yesterday: ‘We will stop Save America.’ He’s getting killed. They can’t do it.”

President Trump says that Republicans should not approve anything until the SAVE Act passes:

“But they have to get it done. Because if we don’t get this done, if it takes six months, I’m for not approving anything. I don’t think we should approve anything until this is approved. And they can’t win politically. Look, you have them in a corner, and they’re listening to every word I’m saying. It doesn’t matter because they can’t win it politically. Because when they say, ‘We don’t want voter identification. We don’t want proof of citizenship,” all these things are just losers for them.”

Chuck Schumer, for his part, keeps arguing that if we clean the voter rolls of people who have moved or are dead and require people to use voter ID, somehow this is going to result in mass voter disenfranchisement, a proposition that pretty much no one actually agrees with. 

“It allows ICE to kick tens of millions of people off the rolls, off the rolls, and they don’t tell them until Election Day,” he huffed. “And you show them, you say. ‘You’re not registered anymore, you’re not registered here, you’re not on the rolls.’ And they say, ‘I didn’t know that.’ This is a bill that destroys the country. And it is not about showing ID when you show up to vote. It’s about the voter registration rolls, destroying them, purging them, not letting people know, and taking the rights in an algorithm put together by ICE, put together by DOGE and Musk. It’s an outrage.” 

If you just say DOGE or Musk three times in a row, Beetlejuice appears, according to Chuck Schumer.

This is silly. If you can’t abide by the law with regard to voting, you shouldn’t vote. And if you moved and you didn’t tell them you moved, then you probably should tell them you moved. Democrats trying to turn basic adult functions into some sort of Mensa test are lying. It’s not that hard to register to vote. It’s not hard to determine where and how to vote. People have been figuring it out for decades.

But now, because Democrats are trying to filibuster the SAVE Act in the Senate, to prevent it from passing by forcing Republicans to find 60 votes in the Senate, President Trump is talking about killing the filibuster.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, by contrast, says, no, we’re not doing that.

“We don’t have the votes either to proceed, get on a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one if we got on it,” he stated. “But that is just a function of math. … I understand the president’s got a passion to see this issue addressed, as we all do. We’ll continue to make that argument because I think it’s important that everybody understands this is really about the votes. It’s about the math.”

A lot of people are asking, why doesn’t Thune kill the filibuster? The answer is simple. He’s concerned if Republicans kill the filibuster, the next time the Democrats have a majority in the House and the Senate and run the presidency, they simply run roughshod over Republicans and essentially end any chance of possible parity in future elections, all with just 51 votes. They add new states, they add new senators, and they change the voting rules and all the rest.

There have been two arguments that have been put out there to counter John Thune’s argument. First, there’s the argument that Republicans should end what’s known as the “talking filibuster.” When most people think about the filibuster, they think of Jimmy Stewart talking for hours until he faints in the film “Mr. Smith goes to Washington.”

It takes 60 votes to ensure “cloture,” which means to stop a talking filibuster. Under Senate Rule 19, each senator can speak twice per day. Members of the same party can hold the floor continuously. Theoretically, Johnson could force Democrats to do that, get up there and just talk and talk and talk and talk.

In the past, however, opposing parties have allowed the so-called “silent filibuster,” a filibuster that all agree would be possible in the absence of talking for days at a time. People basically say, “You don’t have 60 votes. Instead of making us talk for weeks on end, we are not going to do that. You don’t have 60 votes to kill it anyway.”

So why doesn’t John Thune kill the silent filibuster? There are a few practical reasons. First, if 47 Democrats each gave six-hour speeches and did that continuously in a cycle, they could stop the business of the Senate for months. The only way to keep the Senate in session, in order to keep the pressure on Democrats to keep talking, would be for Republicans to maintain a quorum, meaning 51 senators nearby. If they didn’t have a quorum, if somebody goes home and suddenly there are 49 senators, Democrats can move to adjourn the session, the clock restarts, and all the senators can speak twice again. Which means that killing the silent filibuster basically ensures pain, but not gain.

That’s not going to stop critics from attacking Senator Thune and other Republicans as somehow feeble or insufficient in their defense of conservative policy. That’s always the rap from people in my industry toward politicians: “The reason that Republicans don’t do enough is a lack of will. If only they had more Nietzschean willpower! Or maybe they’re corrupt?”

But that’s not what’s happening. The simple case here is that in the Senate, which happens to be a more collegial body than the House, Republicans must always have one eye on the question of what happens when the political shoe is on the other foot.

Just as Democrats killed the judicial filibuster only to watch Republicans stack the Supreme Court, Republicans have to be careful not to kill the filibuster on other issues, just to watch Democrats ram through fundamental changes to the nature of American life and law.

Democrats are obstructing, there’s no question about it.

They aren’t interested in honest voting.