The scene at Trump’s Georgia rally Wednesday night told you everything you needed to know. The president, speaking to a packed crowd, delivered a line that drew thunderous applause: “The Senate is a place you send things when you want them to die.”
He wasn’t talking about Democrats. He was talking about his own party.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE America Act, has been stalled in the Senate for months. The bill is straightforward: show ID to vote in federal elections, and prove citizenship to register. That’s it. It’s the kind of common-sense reform that polls above 70 percent with the general public. And the Republican-controlled Senate has blocked it twice this year.
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt didn’t mince words. When Daily Caller correspondent Reagan Reese pressed her on Trump’s frustration, Leavitt said plainly: “His patience is running out. He wants to see as much of the SAVE America Act passed as possible by the August recess.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s response was to turn around and blame the White House. “She or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?” Thune told reporters on Capitol Hill. “So instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats.”
It’s a deflection that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Democrats blocking the bill on the floor is not a surprise. It never was. The SAVE America Act needs 60 votes to break a filibuster, which means Senate Republicans need to either eliminate the filibuster for this bill or find some Democrat willing to cross the aisle. Neither has happened. And the five Republican holdouts, named publicly by Trump on Truth Social in June: Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and Mitch McConnell, haven’t moved an inch.
When a reporter asked Thune whether the White House was positioning him for electoral blame, he said, “I wish I had a good answer for that.”
Meanwhile, Trump shelved a housing bill he had supported, a move observers read as a pressure tactic on the Senate. The president himself confirmed the linkage in tone if not in words: “To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson has floated rolling the legislation into a reconciliation package. The House passed an approximately $95 billion reconciliation bill Wednesday that includes $10 billion to incentivize states to implement portions of the SAVE Act. But the Senate has already rejected the bill twice, and Thune told reporters on July 16 that the prospect of getting it done before the August recess was “news to him.”
“I have to be the realist,” Thune said then. “I can’t make any guarantees over here.”
Leavitt had a different frame Thursday: “The House did its job. The Senate needs to do its job, too.”
