Vance Dismisses Senate Filibuster as ‘Procedural Bullsh**’

Vice President JD Vance dismissed the Senate filibuster as “procedural bullsh**” during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast Wednesday, and urged Senate Republicans to bypass the rule in order to advance the SAVE America Act, a major priority for the Trump administration that would limit mail-in voting and impose voter-ID requirements nationwide.

Read more Houston Man Killed by ICE, Hailed as Father Chasing ‘American Dream,’ Had Meth in His Car, FBI Says

Vance, in his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, argued that senators are prioritizing an arcane rule over the urgent task of securing America’s elections.

“One of its main provisions is a requirement that you do voter ID. And we actually have, I think, a majority of the Senate that would support it. But this is just weird Senate procedural bullsh**. There is a subsegment of people who want voter ID but won’t blow up the filibuster in order to achieve it,” the vice president said. “They’re so married to these old world Senate procedures that they’re going to make it impossible for us to pass the SAVE America [Act].”

“The filibuster basically says anything that has to do with budget is 50 votes. Everything else, non-budgetary, is 60 votes,” Vance continued. “There’s no provision in the Constitution. Senators are so attached to the idea that budget is 50, non-budget is 60, they’re quite literally willing to prevent voter ID in America.”

Vance and President Trump are pushing Republicans to tack the SAVE Act onto a spending bill, which would exempt the legislation from the 60-vote filibuster threshold and allow passage with a simple majority. Spurred on by House Republicans, Speaker Mike Johnson agreed to append the SAVE Act to an unrelated bill that would fund the State Department and several related agencies, which passed the House Wednesday afternoon.

The filibuster, which protects minority preferences and insulates the Senate from majoritarian swings, has been steadily eroded in recent years: In 2013, Democrats eliminated the use of the filibuster on executive branch and lower court nominations, and in 2017, Republicans similarly changed the rule for Supreme Court nominations.

Vance is not the only Republican aggressively pushing for the SAVE America Act, in an attempt to secure a legislative victory for the Trump administration.

Senator Rick Scott (R., Fla.) even suggested canceling the scheduled August recess until the bill is passed.

“We actually got 50 votes for the House version of the SAVE America Act,” Scott said. “Do everything, attach it to a spending bill, attach it to the National Defense Authorization Act. . . . We’ve got to stay here, if we have to all through August, all through September, all through, I mean, we should work the rest of the year.”

Previously, President Donald Trump attempted to add the SAVE America Act to the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which Senate Majority Leader John Thune rejected. He has also refused to sign a bipartisan housing policy bill that was sent to his desk last month.

Read more Republican Senators Grill Acting AG Blanche on Trump’s $1.8 Million ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’

Prominent Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), however, have said the SAVE America Act will not pass through the Senate.

“I’ll say it as many times as it takes: the [Save America] Act is dead on arrival here in the Senate,” Schumer said. “I don’t care how Republicans try to package their plan to resurrect the old ghost of Jim Crow — we will kill it.”

While the push to further weaken the filibuster has recently gained popularity among House Republicans, several of their colleagues in the upper chamber remain supportive of the institutional bulwark on the grounds that, if the administration gets its way, Democrats will be able to more easily advance their own legislation when they inevitably return to power.

“There’s a right way to do it, there’s a wrong way to do it,” Republican Senator Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) previously said. “Nuking the filibuster doesn’t work. The talking filibuster would be a goat rodeo.”

While he now advocates abandoning the rule, Vance criticized former Vice President Kamala Harris on the campaign trail for her willingness to abandon the filibuster in the service of environmental legislation, saying she “voted to eliminate the filibuster and pass the green new scam.”

Trump has predicted that, without the SAVE Act, he will be the last Republican president ever elected.

“Anybody who doesn’t want to Terminate the Filibuster is a FOOL, a very stupid one, at that!” the president wrote in a social media post in June. “The Republican Party will never win another Election. I will, sadly, be the last Republican President. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and the Republican Senate, must not let this ‘carnage’ happen. They will go down on the wrong side of History, as will all Republicans who just stood by and watched.”

Earlier this month, Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R., Fla.) led a campaign to block procedural motions for the government funding bill that just passed the House over Republican leadership’s initial refusal to tack on the SAVE Act. She now predicts that Thune will lose his seat if he doesn’t abandon the filibuster.

“If John Thune strips it out in the Senate, that will be on him, and the entire country should be watching what he does,” Luna said. “His state party should censure him and/or he should be primaried if he wants to betray his constituents in this manner. That is the nature of politics.”

Read more ICE to Pause Most Traffic-Stop Arrests After Two Fatal Shootings