Stuck in a do-nothing U.S. Senate, the SAVE America Act would be safer in a Canadian euthanasia clinic.
And Senate Majority Leader John Thune has become a laughable Pawn Stars meme, effectively telling President Donald Trump and fellow Republicans, ‘The best I can do is a Screw America Act.”
He’s helpless. That’s the South Dakota Republican’s answer to the urgent call from actual conservatives warning him that the window for critical election integrity reform is quickly closing. Just call him John “Very, Very Difficult” Thune.
“There are no easy ways to do this,” Thune told reporters Tuesday when asked about the prospects of Senate passage of the voter verification legislation. “Believe me, we’ve examined all the options.”
Have they?
‘Yeah, That’s Not Going to Happen’
The Republican-controlled House passed the SAVE America Act nearly a month ago, making the Republican-led Senate prioritize the legislation that requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in U.S. elections and photo identification to cast a ballot. Per usual, the fast-moving bill hit a brick wall.
Originally promising the proposal would come up for a vote, Thune has spent the past few weeks whining about how hard — or impossible — it will be to move the measure to Trump’s desk. It was more of the same on Tuesday, despite the president’s threat that he wouldn’t sign any legislation but a Department of Homeland Security funding package until Senate GOP leadership gets its act together and passes the Save America Act.
House Republicans, the bill’s Senate shepherds, Trump, and even his old buddy Elan Musk have urged Thune to work around the legislative death warrant that is the 60-vote threshold required to move the bill, using the “talking filibuster” to do it. The strategy would force Democrats — who loathe the legislation — to hold the floor to stall a simple majority vote on the election-integrity reform. The rules would place limits on debate. Eventually the Dems would run out of steam and the vote would be called.
But Thune threw cold water on the talking filibuster.
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” the majority leader told ABC News earlier this week. He noted Trump’s call for adding election integrity reforms and a ban on medically transing children to the current version of the SAVE America Act.
“The president clearly is very interested in getting the SAVE America bill up and voted on, although he wants a modified version of it, and so we’ll do our best to do that,” Thune told the corporate news outlet.
“But the one thing I’ve said all along is, and I’ve told him and others, that I can’t guarantee an outcome. I can’t guarantee a result. If the result is only achieved by nuking the legislative filibuster, we don’t have the votes to do that and so that’s not a — that’s just not a realistic option,” he added.
‘His Worst RINO Colleagues’
What “Very, Very Difficult” Thune didn’t say was that he’s likely running cover for RINO senators who claim they support the SAVE America Act but don’t want to have to work for it — or vote on it.
“Understand what Thune is doing right now. It’s not enough for him to kill the SAVE America Act. Thune has to kill it while also protecting his worst RINO colleagues from being exposed for opposing it,” The Federalist’s CEO Sean Davis wrote Tuesday in a post on X.
How does Thune accomplish his subterfuge? By avoiding a majority vote at all costs, Davis asserts.
“Thune knows a public vote where Republicans get less than 50 votes — with people like [Republican Sens. Thom] Tillis and [John] Curtis and [Mitch] McConnell and [Lisa] Murkowski voting against IT — is electoral poison. He doesn’t want it to pass, but he also can’t have it die at the hands of his own puke colleagues,” Davis wrote.
‘A Moment in Time’
Quoting anonymous sources, Politico on Tuesday reported that Thune plans to put the bill up for the standard 60-vote threshold next week, where it is destined to fail under united Democrat opposition. Senators, according to Politico, will be able to engage in extended debate, but Thune knows it’s all an exercise in futility. Most important, nobody has to be held accountable.
“Thune needs to kill the SAVE America Act, not expose any of his GOP colleagues as being against it, and be able to pretend that he tried,” Davis said. “This is the actual Senate GOP trifecta — doing nothing while pretending they tried everything and protecting the worst of the worst the whole time.”
At an event over the weekend, Trump exhorted Senate Republicans to “go for the gold,” calling passage of the election law reforms a matter of “national survival.”
Thune and friends aren’t even brave enough to compete.
They have been presented an enticing offer. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a heated run-off Senate primary with four-term Sen. John Cornyn, has said he would consider dropping out of the race if Senate leadership agree to lift the filibuster and pass the legislation. He called Cornyn a “coward who has refused to support abolishing the filibuster to pass this bill.”
“The SAVE America Act is the most important bill the U.S. Senate could ever pass, and I’m committed to helping President Trump get it done,” Paxton wrote on X.
Last week it appeared Trump was on the verge of giving his endorsement to Cornyn, a blessing Thune and his fellow establishment Republicans have been begging for. But Trump has delayed the endorsement as Senate leadership weakly trudges along.
Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., who serves as chairman of the powerful House Administration Committee, said it is absolutely essential that Republicans force the Senate to vote on the SAVE America Act. He said the foot-dragging has been frustrating.
“We hear the parliamentary procedure arguments from the Senate time and again. I think that’s what frustrates a lot of us,” Steil told me Friday on the Dan O’Donnell Show. “We have a moment in time when we control the United States Senate, the House of Representatives and the presidency. Conservatives are united behind driving this agenda forward, but it seems time and again there’s a small number of folks in the Senate that have caused us to hit a roadblock.”
That would be John “Very, Very Difficult” Thune and his Republican establishment pals, working to avoid consequential votes and to Screw America First.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
