Republican lawmakers are increasingly fed up with President Donald Trump’s insistence on pushing for a doomed voting reform bill, with some telling MS NOW that he should drop the idea because the math behind it just “don’t work.”
The SAVE America Act has emerged as one of Trump’s biggest legislative goals in the last year, verging on an obsession. If signed into law, it would require Americans to produce documents proving their citizenship status, like a birth certificate or passport, when registering to vote, among other provisions, like a rollback of mail-in voting. The bill was drafted largely as a response to Trump’s long-debunked claims about non-citizens committing widespread voter fraud.
Despite passing in the House multiple times, the SAVE Act has stalled out in the face of the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, with across-the-board opposition from Democrats sinking any hope of it prevailing. GOP leaders in the chamber have repeatedly told the president that the votes for the bill just do not exist, and they are also unwilling to nuke the filibuster as it currently is to get around the problem, putting them in a heated stalemate with Trump.
Now, in an MS NOW report from Monday morning, some Republicans are venting about how fed up they are becoming with the ordeal, including noted Trump critics, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska.
“He wants to go it alone, his way to the highway, and it don’t work,” Bacon told the outlet. “He’s trying to pound the square peg through the circle, and it doesn’t work.”
Another Republican spoke to MS NOW anonymously and said that Trump “just can’t change the reality of the Senate,” no matter how much he tries.
“The Senate does not have the votes to pass it, and no matter how much everybody wants to push on it, it’s not gonna move through the Senate unless through reconciliation,” the source said. “And that’s just a reality.”
A second anonymous Republican was considerably more blunt about the matter.
“Republicans — those of us who can do math — would like the president and other members to recognize that there isn’t a path forward,” they said.
A third anonymous Republican, this time from the House, lamented their inability to pursue bills that might get bipartisan support ahead of the midterms due to Trump’s obsessions.
“There’s things that we should be able to do,” the GOP lawmaker said, “But we’re so focused on legislation that will never get a Democratic vote and won’t make it through the reconciliation that it’s stopping all progress.”