I’ve been admittedly skeptical that the current effort to pass the SAVE America Act will succeed. I want it to pass. Desperately. And from where I sit, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t pass. But we all know why something so popular and commonsense can’t get to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature. Democrats in Congress don’t want election integrity and are fighting against it like their power is on the line.
Despite my skepticism, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), the lead sponsor of the bill, is confident the SAVE America Act is going to pass — and after just six days of debate, Democrats may already be looking for a way out.
As you know, the bill does two things. It requires proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a voter ID when casting a ballot. Polls repeatedly show that Americans overwhelmingly support these ideas, regardless of political party or race.
And Sen. Lee knows it, too.
“Americans overwhelmingly believe that voters in the United States, you need to be US citizens,” Lee said. “So our bill does two things in order to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
The fight right now isn’t really about the merits. Let’s be honest about that. It’s about the Senate’s cloture threshold, the 60-vote supermajority needed to end debate and move to a final vote. Republicans don’t have those numbers on their own, which means they need Democrats to break ranks. Lee’s strategy is to make them do exactly that, and he’s drawing on a historical playbook to get it done.
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“We’re using a playbook that in a slightly different form was used in 1964 to overcome a cloture gap of thirty-two votes,” Lee said, referring to the landmark Civil Rights Act debate. Back then, the Senate debated for sixty days before enough votes materialized to close debate. Today’s cloture deficit is far smaller. “We’ve got only a ten-vote cloture deficit to overcome here,” Lee noted. “This is a simpler bill, and it’s preferred by eighty-five percent of American voters.”
The math is encouraging, but Lee argues that the process takes time — and that’s entirely the point. Lee described how sustained debate wears members down and eventually forces movement. “Members grow exhausted over time, and with that exhaustion, we’ll find ways of achieving consensus, perhaps some minor modifications to the legislation, either face-saving or to alleviate substantive concerns,” he said. “We can get there. This will pass if we give it enough time.”
He was careful not to overpromise a timeline. “I don’t know exactly how many weeks, just as they didn’t know when they started the process in 1964,” Lee acknowledged. But he added quickly: “I don’t think it’ll take that long.”
According to Lee, the early signs are apparently promising. After only six days on the floor, he says Democrats are reportedly already hunting for an exit, which tells you something about the political pressure building around this vote.
The only secret to passing the SAVE America Act, Lee says, is time and willpower. Six days in, it looks like the willpower is holding — and the clock is doing the rest of the work.
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