Trump Lashes Out Against the Harsh Reality of Senate Math

President Trump and his supporters in the House have amped up the rhetoric in recent weeks in their campaign to force the SAVE America Act over the line — they’ve threatened, cajoled, and bullied — but they’re running into the hard reality of addition.

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As Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said repeatedly, the votes just aren’t there.

Although the election-security bill has broad support among the GOP base and rabid proponents in the legislature, it is nowhere close to hitting the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster, and it is also likely shy of a simple majority in the Republican-controlled Senate.

“We keep overpromising and underdelivering, which is not a recipe for good morale or high voter participation in the midterm elections,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas told reporters Monday.

The impasse comes as the White House has been clamoring for the passage of the bill, which would mandate proof of citizenship and voter ID in federal elections, as well as compel states to submit their voter rolls to the federal government to verify there are no noncitizens registered.

President Donald Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill earlier this month in protest over Congress’s failure to pass the SAVE America Act. In a Monday Truth Social post, he called on the Senate to cancel its annual August recess, which the chamber is set to begin at the end of next week, to pass the bill, but Majority Leader John Thune was cool toward that prospect.

“Show me a path to passage,” he told reporters hours after Trump made his call. “What’s your picture? If the end game is, we actually get an outcome or a result, we can stay here till Christmas. Democrats aren’t voting for this. I’m just telling you.”

In his post, Trump also repeated his call for Senate Republicans to terminate the filibuster to pass a “full and deep throated SAVE AMERICA ACT.” There are long odds of that happening, however, as Thune has been steadfast in his commitment not to lower the 60-vote threshold, especially since a good chunk of the GOP Senate conference wants to keep the filibuster, which has allowed Republicans to stop Democratic priorities when they have been in the minority.

“The votes aren’t there to do it,” Thune told Sean Hannity Monday night. “I know [Trump] thinks he can persuade people, but this is a hard position for a lot of Senate Republicans.”

The White House and MAGA allies in the House have dismissed the filibuster as a minor obstacle to passage that can be done away with. Speaking on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast earlier this month, Vice President JD Vance dismissed the filibuster as “procedural bulls***.”

“I think, a majority of the Senate that would support it. But this is just weird Senate procedural bulls***. There is a subsegment of people who want voter ID but won’t blow up the filibuster in order to achieve it,” Vance 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].”

Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R., Fla.) led a campaign to block procedural motions for the the House-passed budget reconciliation bill over Republican leadership’s initial refusal to tack on the election-security bill. She now predicts that Thune will lose his seat if he doesn’t abandon the filibuster.

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“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.”

Short of terminating the filibuster, Republicans have tried to pass the bill through the budget reconciliation process, which allows the Senate to bypass the 60-vote threshold and approve fiscal legislation. The House of Representatives passed last week a budget resolution, which serves as a framework to craft a reconciliation bill, that included $10 billion for what would likely be incentives for states to implement the SAVE America Act’s security measures. Trump insisted in a Tuesday night Truth Social post that the SAVE America Act be added to the budget resolution, urging Senate Republicans to “GET IT DONE!” before leaving for August recess.

The difficulty Trump failed to acknowledge is that there are strict rules as to what lawmakers can include in a reconciliation bill, and Republicans are not confident that the core features of the SAVE America Act will pass muster.

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said reconciliation is “the only vehicle” by which the bill could make it through the Senate. “I’m not even sure that will work, but it’s the only one,” he told National Review.

Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota floated the possibility of putting at least the voter ID component into law through reconciliation, but he said it was unclear just how much of SAVE America could make it through reconciliation rules.

“There’s been multiple attempts to do something with it that have all failed so far,” he told NR.

The Senate previously voted on the SAVE America Act when it passed its reconciliation bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies last month, and at the time the bill did not have enough Republican support to pass even if leadership could push it through at a 50-vote threshold.

Four Republicans — Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — voted against a measure that would have added SAVE America’s components to the immigration bill. The Senate GOP needed 60 votes to tack it on, but those four were enough to deprive it of even a simple majority.

In an op-ed published earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal, Murkowski explained her opposition to the bill on the grounds that the bill would harm voters in remote parts of Alaska who would no longer be allowed to register to vote online and would instead be required to show up in-person to one of her state’s six election offices.

Tillis weeks ago spoke strongly against the prospect of including SAVE America measures in a reconciliation bill.

“If I see a reconciliation bill come from the House with another failed attempt to confuse this election, I will use every device I have available to slow down the wheels of government,” he said in a floor speech earlier this month.

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