Senate Republicans have said repeatedly that the bill does not have enough support to pass.
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President Donald Trump has demanded for months without success that Congress pass the Save America Act, a voting bill that he has claimed would “guarantee the midterms” for Republicans.
He repeated that demand on Thursday night in a prime-time address in which he discussed vulnerabilities to the U.S. election infrastructure, urging Americans to call their senators and representatives to demand they pass the bill.
“Congress must pass the Save America Act,” Trump said. “How easy is that to do — unless you want to cheat? The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat.”
Several Senate Republicans called immediately after Trump’s speech for passing the bill. “The Senate should focus on nothing else until the SAVE America Act passes,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the bill’s top Senate advocate, wrote on X.
But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and other Republicans have said repeatedly that the bill does not have enough support to pass the Senate.
Here’s what to know about this controversial bill:
The bill, which passed the House in February, would require Americans to prove their citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo identification to vote. It would also require states to share their voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump has called for adding new provisions to the bill to bar most mail voting, to ban transgender women and girls from competing in women’s and girls’ sports, and to restrict transgender health care for minors.
Democrats have warned that the bill’s requirements would make it harder for Americans to vote. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has described it as “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Trump has claimed that Americans overwhelmingly support the Save America Act — and some of the bill’s provisions are popular.
Sixty-one percent of Americans support requiring that voters provide proof of citizenship such as a passport or a birth certificate and matching photo identification when they register, with 22 percent opposed, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted in February. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in August found 83 percent of Americans supported requiring photo identification to vote, with 16 percent opposed. Banning mail voting was less popular: 58 percent of Americans supported allowing any voter who wants to vote by mail to do so, with 42 percent opposed, according to Pew.
Barring transgender athletes from playing on teams that do not match their sex assigned at birth is also popular, according to Gallup polling conducted last year. And a New York Times-Ipsos poll last year found 71 percent of Americans support barring doctors from providing transgender care such as prescribing puberty-blocking drugs or hormone therapy to anyone under 18.
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Republicans control the Senate 53-47, but it would take 60 votes to surmount a Democratic filibuster and pass the bill.
Lee, the Utah senator, has pressed his colleagues to try to pass the bill by exhausting Democrats by debating the bill for weeks on the Senate floor, but Thune has said not enough Republicans senators support such a strategy to make it work. Nor do Senate Republicans have enough support to abolish the filibuster.
“We are all here in favor of the Save America Act,” Thune said Wednesday, standing with his leadership team. “The folks that have consistently bloc-voted against it are all the Democrats in the United States Senate, and I think that’s unlikely to change. And it’s also very unlikely that the Senate Republicans are going to vote to get rid of the legislative filibuster.”
Not all Senate Republicans support the bill. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) voted against starting debate on the bill in March; Sens. Thom Tillis (North Carolina), Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and Susan Collins (Maine) and Murkowski voted against an amendment last month to attach the Save America Act to another bill.
House Republicans are trying to include parts of the Save America Act in a bill to send more money to the Pentagon and to farmers.
“It’s our best shot at enacting our party’s top-priority legislation, the Save America Act,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said Wednesday.
But the rules of the process that Republicans are using to try to pass the bill without Democratic votes — known as reconciliation — is likely to prevent them from including most of the Save America Act in the bill. Instead, Republicans might need to settle for providing grants to states that put in place the voting measures included in the Save America Act.
It’s also far from clear that the bill Republicans are drafting will have enough support to pass.
Tillis warned Thursday that states would not have enough time to implement the Save America Act before the midterms even if it were to pass.
“What we’re going to do if we continue down this path is to convince the American people that you can’t count on your election results,” Tillis said on the Senate floor. “And that is dangerous. That is irresponsible.”
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