BREAKING: Trump’s Voter Suppression Bill Crashes and Burns in the Senate
Senate Republicans failed Thursday to advance Trump’s sweeping election overhaul, the SAVE America Act, dealing a major blow to legislation the president had declared his top legislative priority. The bill, which passed the House along near party-line lines in February, was brought to the floor as an amendment to an immigration funding package and couldn’t get the votes it needed to clear the Senate.
The centerpiece of the legislation was a requirement that Americans provide documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, just to register to vote. Research consistently shows that millions of Americans lack easy access to those documents. Election experts have also noted that noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare and has never been documented at any meaningful scale in American elections.
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck put it plainly: the problem the bill claims to solve barely exists, and the cure would be far worse than the disease.
Trump had been relentless in pushing the bill, declaring at his State of the Union that it should pass before anything else and even claiming Democrats only opposed it because they want to cheat. He posted about it online as recently as Thursday. Despite all that pressure, Senate Majority Leader Thune conceded there simply weren’t enough Republican votes to go nuclear on the filibuster and force it through.
The bill would have also mandated photo ID for all voters nationwide and required states to cross-reference their voter rolls against a Department of Homeland Security database that has repeatedly flagged legitimate U.S. citizens as potential noncitizens. Law professors have called it one of the most sweeping federal takeovers of election administration in American history.
It failed anyway. And that’s a win for American democracy.