House conservatives bristled this week over the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE America Act — the GOP elections bill that President Donald Trump has called his “No. 1 priority” in Congress — and shut down the floor in protest.
Their outrage has obscured an inconvenient truth for the Republicans locking arms with the president to push for the bill: It can’t even pass the House — at least not the version Trump is pushing.
Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded this year.
Instead, Johnson and other House leaders have stuck with an older version of the SAVE America Act that focuses on proof-of-citizenship requirements but otherwise lets states run their elections as they see fit.
“I’m going to do everything I can with the vote tallies that we have,” he said when asked by a POLITICO reporter if a Trump-style approach to mail voting could come to the floor.
“We all do” want to follow Trump’s lead on the issue, Johnson added. “But the mail-in ballot, he’s acknowledged, is a very difficult thing to regulate at the federal level, because different states do it differently.”
When a band of conservative hard-liners pushed over the past week to add the election bill to the annual Pentagon policy bill, Johnson moved to attach the version of the bill that narrowly passed the House in February, not a broader version that includes the additional provisions Trump has demanded. The latest version Trump wants has never passed the House — which is part of the problem.
The added provisions Trump wants include a blanket prohibition on transgender people playing women’s sports, a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors and the mail voting crackdown — which could effectively end the no-excuse policies both blue and red states employ to send ballots out widely.
Trump has said he would allow exceptions for military members, the disabled and other small groups but he has shown no sign he is willing to abandon the push entirely — saying just this week that the mail voting restrictions must be included. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office this week the “no mail ballots” provision was “maybe the most important of all, because it’s so corrupt.” He added he was willing to allow “strong exceptions” for military members and other limited cases.
But the lack of widespread GOP support for upending the voting systems in states like Arizona, Florida and Alaska is an open secret on Capitol Hill, where many Republicans credit mailed ballots with helping them win tight races.
“Listen, absentee ballots are not a bad thing historically as long as you put some kind of structure on it,” Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) said in an interview. “Just have some commonsensical safeguards for when it has to be postmarked by.”
The Supreme Court last week struck down Trump’s attempts to regulate mail voting by executive order — by restricting the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward.
Amodei said he was “happy” to hear of the ruling: “It says mail-in voting in and of itself is not evil. … There ought to be some mechanism for you to do that”
Rep. Julie Fedorchak (R-N.D.) is an outspoken supporter of the SAVE America Act and has introduced a bill that could allow Republicans to incorporate portions of the elections overhaul in a party-line budget reconciliation bill. But she said a near-total ban on mail-in voting would pose problems for states like hers, where some counties have a single polling place.
“We’re a rural state,” she said. “I understand the concerns about mail-in voting … but I think the solution that I’m in favor of is restricting it and creating these commonsense reforms for it.”
Johnson acknowledged those concerns in his comments Tuesday, saying residents of rural states such as Alaska sometimes find it “very difficult to get to a ballot box, and so they use mail-in ballots very effectively, and I think securely, and that’s something that has to be contended with.”
“There are other states that do it well, and without a problem,” Johnson said. “Our concerns are with the handful, five or six blue states, who abuse this, and California is the avatar for this, because it is so ridiculous.”
In the Senate, where even the narrower House-passed version of the bill has languished due to GOP divisions and a Democratic filibuster, there is also an understanding that the expanded bill Trump wants is DOA.
During a lunch with Trump last week, Sen. Rick Scott told colleagues that while the expanded version of the election bill — including the mail-in ballot provisions — were good policies, there wasn’t consensus for them within the Senate GOP, according to a copy of the Florida Republican’s notes reviewed by POLITICO.
Instead, Scott pointed to other tactics as a more realistic way forward, such as attempting to launch an extended debate on the slimmed-down bill that does not include Trump’s latest demands.
Calen Razor, Jordain Carney and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.
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