Conservatives are putting John Thune in a political pressure cooker as they try to bypass the Senate filibuster and pass a controversial elections bill. The majority leader is making it clear he’s willing to take the heat.
Thune is at the center of a relentless pile-on from prominent figures in the GOP’s MAGA wing who want Senate Republicans to force a “talking filibuster” to smoke out and ultimately defeat Democratic opposition to the bill known as the SAVE America Act — a tactic Thune believes doesn’t have enough support from his members.
President Donald Trump declared the bill his “No. 1 priority” going into the midterms Monday, and House Republicans are vowing to gum up their own chamber in a bid to squeeze the Senate GOP. An intense online campaign reached a crescendo this week with tech mogul Elon Musk joining online calls to remove Thune as leader.
Thune, confident of his support from fellow Republican senators, brushed off the criticism in an interview Tuesday.
“It just kind of comes with the territory,” he said. “You just roll with it, you know. It’s the times in which we live.”
Thune spoke just hours after announcing plans to call up the bill next week in a bid to bring an unusually acrimonious stretch for his conference to an end. It will not include a talking filibuster gambit that would skirt the usual 60-vote threshold by instead forcing Democrats to hold the floor if they want to block the bill.
The pressure has frustrated GOP senators who believe the increasingly public infighting has transformed an issue that polls well for them — preventing noncitizens from voting in federal elections — into a messy internal brawl.
Fed up with a crowd of conservative social media influencers flooding their online accounts with messages about a talking filibuster — many of them egged on by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) — a few are growing more blunt about those frustrations.
“Spare me the insights,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is retiring. “They’re worse than Democrats because they’re so-called Republicans that are trying to undermine Republicans.”
Another GOP senator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, described the online rhetoric as “bullshit.” A third senator, granted anonymity for similar reasons, summed up the feeling within the conference: “A lot of us are done.”
Four Republicans granted anonymity described Thune as privately exasperated by the social media rhetoric, believing that it ignores the mathematical reality in the Senate that the talking filibuster as proposed can’t deliver what its proponents want — passage of the SAVE America Act — and could tie up the chamber for months in the meantime.
While Thune has remained publicly even-keeled, he has spoken in increasingly sharp terms about the matter — believing that his job as majority leader is to be honest about the legislative realities at play, even if they frustrate some in the party. No Republican senator, including Lee, has called for Thune’s removal as leader.
“Those votes aren’t there for a talking filibuster, “ he told reporters Tuesday. “I’m the person who has to deliver sometimes the not-so-good news that the math doesn’t add up.”
The headaches for Senate Republicans go beyond the wave of online criticism. Trump, who has the loudest megaphone in the party, is not only backing the talking filibuster effort but appears to be holding off on a crucial endorsement of Texas Sen. John Cornyn ahead of a costly primary runoff in a bid to force action on it.
Thune said senators have “conveyed” to Trump there isn’t support inside the GOP ranks to successfully deploy a talking filibuster — something the president appeared to acknowledge during a news conference Monday.
Doing so would require the majority party to maintain attendance and control of the floor on a constant basis for weeks on end. Not only would the underlying bill be subject to extended debate, but Democrats could offer endless amendments and procedural motions that Republicans would have to constantly vote down. No bill in modern Senate history has been passed in that manner.
Lee and his allies argue that the focused public attention on the issue of noncitizen voting will ultimately cause Democrats to fold after a lengthy fight. Some have compared it to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which passed after a two-month filibuster — though only after senators voted 71-29 to close debate.
The party’s internal fight comes to a head next week when Thune is expected to bring the SAVE America Act to the floor subject to the 60-vote legislative filibuster. The weeks of infighting and skepticism from a few GOP senators about the substance of the bill has Republicans questioning if they even have the 50 votes needed to launch debate, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Lee and other hard-right members of the House and Senate are showing no signs of backing down, seemingly ready to drive the intraparty fight down to the wire.
“Americans want the SAVE America Act. The Senate should do everything it can in an effort to pass it.,” Lee said in one of several tweets about the bill Tuesday. “While passage isn’t guaranteed, we can be certain that failure will be the outcome if we don’t try.”
Some GOP senators have grown increasingly frustrated with Lee as he’s pushed for a talking filibuster, even though the idea has never had a clear path toward getting enough support within the conference.
One Republican senator granted anonymity said in a recent interview that colleagues feel like Lee is fundraising off the issue. A second on Tuesday said Lee had negatively impacted his own relationships within the conference, though they questioned whether the Utah Republican cared.
Lee has supporters within the Senate, not to mention the backing of the president. Thune also touched a nerve with Lee and conservative activists this week when he publicly attributed some of the online pressure to a “paid influencer ecosystem.”
In a video posted to X Monday, Lee didn’t directly mention Thune but urged his supporters to redouble their efforts and “make clear this is not the product of paid influencers.”
Asked about the online backlash, Thune clarified his comments Tuesday. He drew a distinction between “passion across the country … at the grassroots level” and “others in the social media world.”
Compounding the internal skepticism about the talking filibuster strategy is that a number of GOP senators, including Thune, oppose changing Senate rules to eliminate or weaken the 60-vote legislative filibuster.
Lee and his allies argue that the talking filibuster would avoid the need for a rules change. But a number of GOP senators believe it would still in practice weaken the filibuster and pave the way for Democrats to pass far-reaching legislation of their own when they regain power.
Others have raised concerns that a talking filibuster, without rules changes that enforce limits on the debate, could stifle the majority party’s agenda at a crucial moment ahead of the midterms. It could also give Democrats the chance to try to hijack the elections bill by seeking to amend it with their own priorities — at the very least forcing GOP incumbents to take politically damaging votes.
Talking filibuster advocates “have no earthly idea how unlikely it is we’ll be successful at the end of the day,” Tillis said. “And yet they want to pressure me into exposing some of our candidates to votes that make no sense, that are not going to succeed.”
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