Nothing says "I'm retiring and I don't care" quite like a Republican senator promising to personally gum up the works on his own party's top election integrity bill. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who is not running for reelection and therefore exists in that special zone where accountability goes to die, announced Thursday that he would use "every device" at his disposal to slow down the SAVE America Act if Republicans try to push it through reconciliation.
The SAVE America Act, formally the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, would require proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and photo ID to cast a ballot. President Trump has made the legislation a centerpiece of his election security agenda heading into the midterms. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt framed it plainly before Trump's primetime address Thursday: "I think all Americans, Democrat, Republican, should agree that we are the greatest country in the history of the world. We should have the safest and most secure elections in the history of the world."
Tillis, however, is not interested in the timeline. He argued the bill cannot be implemented before the upcoming midterms because multiple levels of government would need to overhaul how elections are run. And he delivered his objection with the energy of a man who has clearly been making this argument to people who are not listening.
"I have been trying to explain for nearly a year that the SAVE Act, whether it's the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that's being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are, all of them are fundamentally flawed and impossible to implement by this election," Tillis said. Give the man credit for the franchise joke. That was almost funny.
Tillis says he supports grants to help states with voter ID but opposes jamming the bill into reconciliation. "Let's stop the charade. Let's stop the distraction," he said, adding that lawmakers should focus on funding the government instead of clogging reconciliation with "another piece of policy airdropped by a member of this Senate or the White House."
Meanwhile, Democrats remain unanimously opposed to the bill, which only deepens Republican suspicions about their motives. Those suspicions got a boost when a video surfaced of Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan saying the SAVE America Act would make it "hard for any Democrat in any state to win any election." She did not elaborate on why requiring voters to prove citizenship would have that effect, which is the kind of thing that writes its own punchline.
Republican Rep. Tony Wied of Wisconsin was happy to provide one anyway: "Democrats are saying the quiet part out loud. They know they can't win on their own merit."
Reconciliation allows budget-related bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority instead of the usual 60 votes. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority, but a standalone version of the SAVE Act would need 60 votes to clear a filibuster, which is not happening with Democrats united against it.
So the math here is simple. Democrats are blocking the bill because they oppose it. Tillis is threatening to block it while claiming he supports election security in theory. And Trump's signature election integrity legislation now faces resistance from both sides of the aisle, which is the kind of bipartisan cooperation nobody asked for.
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