The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has trashed President Donald Trump’s push for a MAGA-fied version of voter integrity.
The Murdoch-owned paper tore into the SAVE America Act on Tuesday, dismissing Trump’s claims of endemic voter fraud as unsupported by evidence and warning the bill could backfire spectacularly on the GOP.
On the same day, in a typically unhinged rant on Truth Social, the president warned he would not endorse any lawmaker who does not vote to pass the bill, which would require proof of citizenship for voter registration and largely scrap mail-in ballots in elections.
“Although Mr. Trump insists that voter fraud is endemic, his big claims aren’t backed by hard evidence,” the board reacted to his bill. “The President recently said illegal aliens are voting in such huge numbers that he won Minnesota three times.” Audits across Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Utah, and Idaho, the board noted, have found noncitizen voting “to be rare.”
The legislation, which passed the House last month, has two main components: requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote and mandating photo ID at the polls. The citizenship provision is where the board draws blood.
Standard driver’s licenses often don’t confirm citizenship status, and enhanced licenses—which do—are available in only five states bordering Canada. That leaves millions of eligible American voters scrambling for passports or birth certificates they may not have on hand.
The Journal’s editorial board posed the uncomfortable demographic question Republicans don’t appear to be asking internally. Trump’s coalition, made up of voters without degrees and lower-income earners, is precisely the group least likely to have passports and birth certificates readily available. Kamala Harris, the board noted, won college graduates and voters earning over $100,000.
Trump has pushed to expand the bill further, seeking to restrict mail voting nationwide and override the laws of states including Florida, Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The board was unsparing on this point, noting: “Republicans rightly opposed President Biden’s attempt to federalize voting rules on the lax California model. Have they given up federalist principle?”
As it stands, the only path for the SAVE Act is if the filibuster were scrapped, meaning it would only require a simple majority in the GOP-controlled Senate.
However, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been forced to inform Trump that there just isn’t enough support for changing the rule.
“For better or worse, I’m the one who has to be the clear-eyed realist about what we can achieve here,” Thune told reporters last week.
The board’s filibuster warning was equally stark. If Republicans use 51 Senate votes to push the bill through, Democrats would have the same precedent to mandate ballot harvesting, ban voter ID, admit Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico as states—adding four Democratic senators—or pack the Supreme Court.
The board’s verdict on the trade-off was blunt: “In exchange for laying the groundwork, Republicans get... the SAVE America Act? No thanks.”
It comes after Trump declared that his bill is the “most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself.”
He said that “only sick, demented, or deranged people in the House or Senate could vote against” his legislation.
The White House has been approached for comment.
