Senate Republicans are panicking that Donald Trump will spend the rest of the summer publicly hammering them over a voting bill they have little to no chance of passing.
The SAVE America Act, which the 80-year-old president has ranked above everything else on his agenda, would force Americans to produce citizenship paperwork when they register and show photo ID at the polls.
Trump has repeatedly claimed the act is essential because millions of noncitizens keep participating in elections to stop him from winning them. Studies, even by the MAGA-aligned D.C. think tank the Heritage Foundation, have shown time and again that cases of noncitizen voting are vanishingly rare.
The House approved the bill in February almost entirely along party lines. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats. They need 60 to pass what Trump has cast as the party’s insurance policy for November, telling GOP representatives in March that the measures would all but “guarantee the midterms.”
Sen. Mike Rounds, 71, told Politico on Monday that an August offensive from the president would shock nobody. “That would be consistent with his approach,” he said. “We also know the votes aren’t there.”
Senators cleared out of Washington for the summer recess on Saturday with no version of the legislation advanced. They will not sit again until Sept. 14. That leaves them just three weeks of floor time, before they scatter for October and the midterms, for a vote they’ve already failed to pass six times.
Majority Leader John Thune, 65, whom Trump has threatened to have ousted from leadership over the debacle, called up a narrower photo ID measure early Saturday morning, written by Ohio Sen. Jon Husted. Every Republican who voted backed it. The move still fell eight votes short, at 52-46.
One GOP senator, speaking anonymously, told Politico that Thune’s calculation was simple. “He thinks it will give us cover with the president,” they said. “I think he’s wrong,” they went on, adding their colleagues were “not factoring in the president’s reaction.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, 65, was blunter about the math. “At the end of the day, all Republicans need to start getting satisfied with everybody pretty quickly, so that we can get the voters to be satisfied with us, and we maintain our majority at least in the Senate,” he told the publication.
“I look at political data almost every day of the week,” he went on. “I don’t see [the SAVE America Act] as one of the major factors that are going to get [voters] out to the polls.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
