President Trump has made election integrity one of the defining fights of his second term.
But the Senate Republicans he needs to get it done are turning on each other.
And what just happened behind closed doors has one America First senator absolutely furious.
A “Pile-On” Behind Closed Doors
The SAVE America Act is about as commonsense as legislation gets. The bill would require voters to present a photo ID to vote, proof of citizenship for voter registration, and severely curtail the use of mail-in balloting. It passed the House. It has majority support in the Senate. And yet, Senate Republicans can’t seem to get out of their own way long enough to put it on the floor and fight for it.
Things got ugly recently when Republican senators ganged up on U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) at a closed-door lunch meeting. U.S. Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and John Kennedy (R-LA) led what one source described to reporter Andrew Desiderio as a “pile-on” against the Utah Republican during the closed-door lunch meeting.
Cornyn and Kennedy challenged Lee about his strategy and complained that Trump is being led to believe it’s possible for the Senate to pass it, leading to Republicans attacking each other and Trump undermining his own agenda.
Let that sink in for a moment. The complaint wasn’t that the bill is bad policy. The complaint was that someone is telling the President of the United States the truth about what his own party could accomplish if it had the spine to try.
Thune Goes on Fox and Waves the White Flag
Lee appeared on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, where former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany asked whether there was a path forward for the election integrity bill. Lee didn’t blink.
“Yes, there is, Kayleigh, and I respectfully but very strongly disagree with my colleague from South Dakota on that,” Lee replied.
Lee said his “preferred means” for advancing the legislation would be to “put the bill on the floor today,” referring to the version that passed the House and already has majority support in the Senate. He added that “if the majority leader were to announce we are going to debate this till we pass it, we would get to the point of passage.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) went on Fox News’ Special Report the same day and told host Bret Baier a very different story. “We only got 48 votes; we had that vote last week on all five components. The only way you can obviously get this done is to nuke the legislative filibuster, and that is not something that we have anywhere close to the votes to do.”
Forty-eight votes. On a bill that most of the country supports. On a bill that already cleared the House. On a bill that a majority of Senate Republicans cosponsored.
Cornyn’s Parting Shots
The closed-door pile-on didn’t stay behind closed doors for long. The fight spilled onto social media, with Cornyn publicly tagging Thune and telling Lee to stand down.
“Mike, I am a co-sponsor and have repeatedly voted for this but you don’t have the votes,” Cornyn wrote, publicly tagging Majority Leader John Thune. “Try focusing on Democrats instead of Republicans.”
Lee wasn’t having it.
“We have the votes to pass it,” Lee argued in a series of rapid-fire X posts. “The fact that we don’t (yet) have the votes for cloture doesn’t mean we couldn’t and wouldn’t get there if we resolved to keep debating it until it passes.”
Worth noting: Cornyn lost his Texas primary to Attorney General Ken Paxton last month. The comments came just hours after Trump formally endorsed Paxton on Truth Social, delivering a major boost to the Texas attorney general as he seeks to unseat Cornyn in the Republican runoff election. In his endorsement, Trump criticized Cornyn for insufficient loyalty during politically difficult periods of his presidency.
Trump wrote that “Ken Paxton has been a warrior for Texas values and for our America First agenda.” He added that Cornyn “was not supportive of me when times were tough.”
And Cornyn is out here lecturing Mike Lee about how to fight for the base.
The Conservative Grassroots Are Watching
Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, did not hold back after news of the lunch meeting leaked. “Using the conference lunch to go after the one guy asking them to please do something the country cares about, for a change, and then smugly leaking their outright contempt for the GOP base — and for the president! — to the campus regime scribes,” Bovard wrote.
She’s been sounding the alarm on this for months. Bovard said many Senate Republicans are “waiting to be led.” She said, “This bill did receive a majority of the conference cosponsoring it; they are just waiting to be led. This is a conference again, the bulk of which has never seen a leader that’s willing to listen to them and to lead into a broadly politically popular fight.”
But waiting to be led is a polite way of describing what’s really happening. An amendment to attach the SAVE America Act to the reconciliation bill was defeated 48-50, with Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) joining every Democrat in voting no. Four Republicans crossed over to kill it. Four.
What This Really Means
The SAVE America Act isn’t some fringe proposal cooked up in a think tank. Requiring photo ID and proof of citizenship to vote is one of the most broadly popular policy positions in the country. The American people sent a Republican majority to Washington to pass exactly this kind of legislation. The House did its job. And the Senate responded by holding a closed-door lunch meeting to yell at the one senator who keeps insisting they try.
Despite a mandate from the American people to secure elections, Thune admitted that the Republican conference is “not unified” on using the talking filibuster to force a vote on the SAVE Act. That admission has been sitting out there for months, and nothing has changed.
The 2020 election raised serious and legitimate questions that millions of Americans have never stopped asking. Last-minute changes to voting rules made under the cover of COVID, private money flooding into election offices, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the final weeks of the campaign — these aren’t conspiracy theories. They’re documented facts. The SAVE America Act is the most direct legislative answer to those concerns, and the Senate can’t muster the will to pass it.
Cornyn predicted that if Democrats take control of the House or Senate in the midterms, Trump would face “the most miserable two years of his life.” That’s probably true. But you don’t prevent that outcome by pile-driving the one senator fighting to give Republicans a winning issue before November. You prevent it by passing the bill.
The voters who put this majority in place are paying attention. And what they’re watching right now isn’t a pretty picture.
Sources: The Daily Caller, Breitbart News, Raw Story, NOTUS, Conservative Brief, The Federalist, Punchbowl News, Democracy Docket, Conservative Partnership Institute