Republicans have the Senate. They have the House. They have the White House. So why can't they pass one of Donald Trump's biggest priorities, the SAVE America Act? The official excuse is the Democrat filibuster, and that's true enough. But there's a far uglier explanation, and it could be even worse.
The SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, already passed the House. It reportedly has the votes to pass the Senate, too. The only thing standing in its way is the Democrat "filibuster," which Republicans love to blame for every stalled bill. But according to multiple sources familiar with a closed-door GOP Senate lunch on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) privately acknowledged something far more embarrassing: a bloc of Republican senators dislikes Trump so personally that they will never vote for this bill, no matter what's in it.
"Yeah, that totally happened," a source familiar with the matter told the Daily Caller, confirming Thune made the admission.
Thune's office, naturally, denied it outright. "This is a baseless claim, and it is unequivocally untrue," a spokesperson told the Daily Caller.
Sure.
The lunch itself reportedly turned into a shouting match. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the bill's chief Senate sponsor, got piled on by his own colleagues, including Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thune himself. Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio first broke the story, writing on X that the session amounted to a "pile-on" against Lee, with Cornyn and Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) arguing Trump was "being led to believe it's possible for the Senate to pass it, leading to Republicans attacking each other & Trump undermining his own agenda."
Translation: don't get the president's hopes up, or we'll all look bad when we don't deliver.
Lee isn't buying the surrender. On Fox News' The Ingraham Angle Tuesday, former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany asked whether a path forward still existed. "Yes, there is, Kayleigh, and I respectfully but very strongly disagree with my colleague from South Dakota on that," Lee said. He admitted the bill sits ten votes short of the 60 needed for cloture, but insisted there's another way. "You don't actually have to have 60 votes to pass a bill. You just have to have 60 votes to force cloture, but you can break a filibuster through other means," Lee said, suggesting the majority leader simply put the House-passed bill on the floor and grind it out. "If the majority leader were to announce we are going to debate this till we pass it, we would get to the point of passage," he said.
But Thune isn't interested.
Asked on Special Report about Trump's push to attach the bill to FISA reauthorization, Thune noted the bill got just 48 votes in its last Senate test. He also ruled out nuking the filibuster. "The only way you can obviously get this done is to nuke the legislative filibuster, and that is not something that we have anywhere close to the votes to do."
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Here's the problem. The SAVE America Act isn't a Trump vanity project. Its legacy is election integrity, not Trump's ego. Requiring proof of citizenship to vote is common sense, and it has enormous public support. If a handful of Senate Republicans are really willing to torch that legislation because they can't stand the man in the Oval Office, they've confused their personal feelings with their job description. Love Trump or hate him, this bill is the right thing to do, and any Republican who can't see that it's bigger than one man doesn't deserve anyone's vote.
I think we know who some of them are, too.
