Republicans are turning to budget reconciliation to pass the SAVE America Act into law, but some doubt the process will result in the election integrity measures offered in the current version of the bill.
“There’s a lot of support for a budget reconciliation bill,” Majority Leader Thune, R-S.D., told press this week. While the budget reconciliation process, the process that resulted in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” last year, circumvents the Senate’s 60-vote cloture rule, some Republicans doubt that the SAVE America Act would end up on President Donald Trump’s desk.
The GOP strategy to pass the SAVE America Act has changed rapidly this week.
Over the weekend, Trump was pushing the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act using the talking filibuster, which would circumvent the Senate’s 60-vote cloture rule, before reopening the Department of Homeland Security.
After a meeting with Republican senators at the White House on Monday afternoon, however, Republicans have shifted to attempting to pass the SAVE America Act in a second reconciliation bill.
But budget reconciliation has rules that could prevent the SAVE America Act from being included in the legislation.
“I’m all for it, but I have not heard a single person make a cogent case that SAVE America Act is Byrd-able, that it will pass muster in the Senate,” Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, said on “The Signal Sitdown.”
The Byrd Rule directs the Senate parliamentarian to block provisions unrelated to the budget from being a part of a reconciliation package. Conservatives are concerned that because the SAVE America Act’s provisions center around proof of citizenship to vote and implementing nationwide voter ID, it would not survive the parliamentarian’s “Byrd bath.”
“If it is, great. But I do not think that we should be getting our voters and the American people’s hopes up that that’s going to work,” Gill said.
“The purpose of all of this is not to message,” Gill continued. “It’s to get this on the president’s desk. And candidly, I don’t think reconciliation is the way to do that. I think that if it were, we likely would have done it in the first reconciliation bill, but we didn’t.”
The House Freedom Caucus also doubts that the SAVE America Act will survive reconciliation. “Senate Republicans claiming they will pass the SAVE America Act via budget reconciliation are gaslighting you,” the caucus posted on X.
Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, two members who have been pushing hard for this legislation to reach the president’s desk, agreed that this is not a viable option. Self went as far as to say that anyone who says they can is “lying to you.”
The Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, previously put out a framework for a second reconciliation bill in January, focused on housing, health care, and energy.
Pfluger suggests that reconciliation offers a path forward for these issues and for the SAVE America Act.
“When 84% of Americans support requiring proof of citizenship to vote and the Left is still blocking it, that tells you everything you need to know about why reconciliation is the only path forward,” Pfluger told The Daily Signal.
