President Donald Trump called on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) during his State of the Union address to get him to invoke a talking filibuster on the SAVE America Act — but Thune has still not committed to doing so.
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President Donald Trump called on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) during his State of the Union address to get him to invoke a talking filibuster on the SAVE America Act — but Thune has still not committed to doing so.
Included in his Tuesday night list of tasks for Congress was to get the voter ID bill, also called the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, through the Senate.
While the legislation has already passed the House of Representatives, it does not have the support to make the 60-vote threshold to bypass the filibuster in the Senate.
Rep. Susan Collins (R-ME), a moderate, became the fiftieth Senate Republican to announce her support for the act, while staunch anti-Trump Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) remains the only GOP senator to oppose it.
“Perhaps most importantly, I’m asking you to approve the SAVE America Act,” Trump told the audience of lawmakers gathered in the chamber on Tuesday night. “To stop illegal aliens and others, who are uncommitted persons, from voting in our sacred American elections.”
“The cheating is rampant in our elections. It’s rampant. It’s very simple. All voters must show voter ID,” Trump continued, garnering applause from Republicans. “All voters must show proof of citizenship in order to vote.”
Arguing that Democrat policies are “so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat,” Trump added, “We have to stop it, John.”
Many Republicans, including Trump, want Thune to use a procedural maneuver known as a talking filibuster that would force Democrats to debate the bill on the floor so that it would ultimately require only a simple majority to pass.
Thune took to Fox News on Wednesday to announce that he would get it on the floor to “have a vote” and “put the Democrats on the record” as being against the wildly popular concept of voter ID.
That commitment did not go far enough for Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) or Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), both sponsors of the bill.
“We know there will ‘be a vote,’” Roy wrote on X in response to Thune’s Fox News appearance. “But this is guaranteed failure theater at a 60 vote threshold without forcing a real (talking) filibuster…”
According to Lee, it is “great” that Thune has agreed to force a vote on the SAVE America Act, but it “isn’t enough.”
“President Trump and the American people are calling on us to PASS this bill,” the senator wrote, arguing that a talking filibuster “must be required.”
Sean Davis, CEO and co-founder of the Federalist, also shared his analysis on X:
“This is classic failure theater from Thune. He doesn’t want to do the work of forcing Democrats to maintain a real filibuster, so he’s just going to file cloture on their zombie filibuster, which will fail,” Davis wrote.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
