President Donald Trump demanded Monday that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) keep the Senate in session until it passes a voting bill that he has said would “guarantee the midterms” for Republicans.
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The bill, the Save America Act, would require Americans to prove their citizenship to register to vote and to show photo identification when voting.
“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER,” Trump wrote on social media.
The Senate is scheduled to be in session for the next two weeks before leaving for a five-week recess.
Senate Democrats have vowed to block the Save America Act, which would require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Some Republicans have called for scrapping the filibuster or getting around it to pass the legislation, but Thune has said repeatedly that neither approach has enough support among Republicans to succeed.
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Trump warned in his post that Democrats will do away with the filibuster if they retake the Senate majority, but it’s not clear that enough Democrats would support such a move if the party regains power.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) described the filibuster in a Post op-ed on Monday as “a critical line of defense that prevents President Donald Trump from having a fill-in-the-blank government with new laws, deregulation or procedures of its choosing.”
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