GOP warns Democrats using DHS shutdown to stall Senate voter ID push
Senate Republicans are hoping to move full steam ahead on Trump-backed voter ID legislation, but there’s one problem — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is still shut down.
Though negotiations between Senate Democrats and the White House are still ongoing, albeit at a molasses-like pace, there is no clear sign that a deal will be struck before lawmakers return to Washington, D.C., next week.
Reopening the agency will be front and center in the Senate, meaning other priorities, like the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, will be sidelined.
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Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who has led the charge in the Senate to build support around the SAVE America Act, hoped the bill would be on the floor as soon as the day after President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address next week.
But he acknowledged that ending the partial shutdown would likely take precedence.
"That’s the problem with taking a weeklong recess when they’ve shut down not just a department, but an entire department — and a particularly big department," Lee said.
"That’s valuable time lost. As far as the objective of getting us to turn to this next week shortly after we get back, that seems less possible in light of the fact that that happened," he continued.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., guaranteed that the voter ID legislation would get a vote. It’s just a matter of when, given the uncertainty surrounding DHS.
"My job is to try and do the best to ensure that we're making the most, doing, getting the most we can out of the opportunity we have here," Thune told Fox News Digital.
The SAVE America Act is riding high on a fresh wave of momentum in the Senate, with 50 Republicans, including Thune, backing it. That means it can move through at least one key procedural hurdle.
"If we’re still in a shutdown, that obviously will have some bearing on what we decide, how we decide to schedule the floor," he continued.
The most valuable asset in the upper chamber is floor time, given the number of procedural hoops any legislation or nominee has to jump through to get passed or confirmed.
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And one of the first actions lawmakers will take when they return — unless a deal is struck between now and Monday — is to again vote on a full-year DHS funding bill, according to the current floor schedule in the upper chamber.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and nearly every Senate Democrat blocked that bill and a short-term funding extension before lawmakers left town last week.
Trump told reporters earlier this week that the current DHS closure was a "Democrat shutdown, Republicans have nothing to do with it."
He also suggested that Democrats were in their shutdown posture because, among other issues, they rejected voter ID and proof of citizenship to vote.
"If you have voter ID, if you have proof of citizenship, they could never get elected, and they know that," Trump said.
There are other issues in the Senate that need attention, too, Thune noted. Confirming more of Trump’s judicial nominees and putting a raft of bipartisan housing legislation that passed through the House on the floor are top of mind for the top Senate Republican.
Still, Lee was hopeful that once the DHS situation was resolved, the SAVE America Act would be next in line.
"What I hope we’ll do is get back, turn — perhaps immediately — to DHS funding and make [Democrats] continue to vote, continue to object to unanimous consent requests to pass some kind of funding mechanism, and keep making them vote over and over again until we get something like that passed," Lee said. "And then as soon thereafter as possible, turn to SAVE America."