The Abysmal Quality of the GOP Senate Caucus Is the Real Issue, and the SAVE Act Mess Has Made That Clear

The Federalist’s Sean Davis did an excellent job of summing up the predicament the Republican Party finds itself in at the moment, with lots of time until the 2026 midterms (but no real indication that will make much difference):

Understand what Thune is doing right now. It’s not enough for him to kill the SAVE America Act. Thune has to kill it while also protecting his worst RINO colleagues from being
exposed for opposing it.

How does Thune accomplish his? By avoiding a simple majority vote at all…

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) March 10, 2026

The whole quote:

Understand what Thune is doing right now. It’s not enough for him to kill the SAVE America Act. Thune has to kill it while also protecting his worst RINO colleagues from being exposed for opposing it.

How does Thune accomplish his? By avoiding a simple majority vote at all costs. Thune knows a public vote where Republicans get less than 50 votes—with people like Tillis and Curtis and McConnell and Murkowski voting against IT—is electoral poison. He doesn’t want it to pass, but he also can’t have it die at the hands of his own puke colleagues.

So how does Thune do this? By refusing to move to the already-passed House bill (this only requires a simple majority because the House message is privileged) and instead moving to a new, standalone Senate bill. A new Senate bill is not privileged, and therefore the motion to proceed to it is debatable, meaning it requires 60 votes.

Thune needs to kill the SAVE America Act, not expose any of his GOP colleagues as being against it, and be able to pretend that he tried. This is the actual Senate GOP trifecta—doing nothing while pretending they tried everything and protecting the worst of the worst the whole time.

So when you watch the GOP Senate bring up a brand new SAVE America Act bill and hold a single vote on a motion that needs 60 to pass, know that they’re doing it because they think you’re stupid.

Nothing about Davis’ statement is off-base. It anything, he’s underselling the situation.

Let’s remember that more than four in five Americans want the SAVE America Act passed. Why? Because it’s a basic, obvious piece of common-sense legislation that installs voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements so as to keep our elections from being polluted by noncitizens, not to mention the undead, from voting.

Without election integrity, there is no point to holding elections. You aren’t a representative republic anymore. You’re a mere facsimile of that. Your entire political system is a fraud. And Americans are increasingly aware that could be — is, if you prefer — what we have already.

With some 20 million illegal aliens residing here — some three million are reported to have departed since President Trump’s second inauguration, which is a nice start to fixing this problem but nowhere near enough to save the country — it’s no secret what a crucial issue election integrity is.

The polls are all over the place on the issue, but a large fraction, if not a majority, of Americans think the 2020 election was decided wrongly on the basis of illegal or fraudulent votes. Recent legal developments in Arizona and Georgia have done nothing to allay those concerns.

Nor do the utterly brazen words and deeds of the Democrat Party, who can’t possibly signal their intentions any louder.

You’re aware that the Department of Homeland Security is currently shut down thanks to a Democrat filibuster of its funding bill in the Senate, right? Are you aware of why the Democrats are keeping DHS shut down — which manifests itself most prominently in TSA agents not being paid and staging intermittent sick-outs at airports while we’re in the middle of an armed conflict with the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism — at present?

It’s not a secret. They’re telling us why. They want a guarantee that no ICE agents will show up at polling precincts in November.

On its face this is an absurd demand. Why would ICE agents need to be at polling places? You have to be a citizen to vote, right? So why would ICE have any reason to be at polling places; there wouldn’t be any illegals for them to deport at those places. And the people voting would all be citizens, so it’s not like anybody should care if ICE was there.

What a colossally strange thing to cause a government shutdown over!

Unless, of course, it’s your plan to send illegals to the polls and you want to do so with alacrity.

And that isn’t a secret, either. Here was Chuck Schumer:

Schumer on the Save America Act: “It allows ICE to kick tens of millions of people off the voter rolls!” pic.twitter.com/nPizVUU6yc

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) March 10, 2026

The temptation might be to say that’s just demagoguery and hyperbole. Except to take that position would be to assume something almost like good faith on Schumer’s part — that he’s just playing ordinary obstructive opposition politics.

Except, why? He’s on the wrong side of an 85–15 issue, and he’s saying these things. Ordinary politics says (1) you don’t want to be responsible for shutting down TSA when we’re at war with the Iranians, who’d love nothing more than to hijack a plane and fly it into the Capitol or White House or Times Square and (2) if you’re going to be on the wrong side of an 85–15 issue you really don’t want to invest too much political capital into that fight.

No. This isn’t ordinary politics. This is about breaking open the elections system so that you can dragoon a dependent underclass of low-wage, low-skill noncitizens to the polls and change America forever.

Think this is beyond Schumer and the Democrats? Why? They’ve already said when they get full power in Washington again they’ll tube the filibuster to make D.C. and Puerto Rico into states, pack the Supreme Court, blow up the Second Amendment, and do a host of other things that put paid to the concept that we’re the republic most of us grew up in.

The Democrats have shown us who they are. The problem is that so have the Republicans.

Thune’s response to the demand of the entire Republican voting base and the majority of the rest of the country to pass the SAVE America Act was to say this was just the product of advocacy by a bunch of loudmouthed social media influencers. And when that went over like a fart in church, he said there was no majority in the Senate to pass it.

And that he was at the mercy of the Democrats to get an “outcome.”

Nobody believes this.

Especially since the bill came over from the House on a privileged motion, which means by Senate rules there should not be a filibuster available.

He can call a vote and then he needs 50 out of the 53 senators in his caucus to vote yes. Vice President Vance is available to break a tie if one presents itself.

Instead he’s pretending the Democrats can filibuster the bill, and alleging that he doesn’t have the votes to produce a talking filibuster.

All the while demanding that Trump endorse the members of his caucus who create this problem. For example, John Cornyn of Texas, who claims to be a co-sponsor of the SAVE America Act but wasn’t a proponent of the means to pass it until his opponent Ken Paxton, who is leading by a 49–41 count in one poll of that primary runoff race, volunteered to withdraw from the race should the act pass.

For his part, Trump said Wednesday that the bill was the most popular piece of legislation to come through Congress that he’d ever seen, and stated that Thune would have to “be a leader” to get it to his desk.

Trump certainly isn’t wrong.

When you’ve got a bill this politically valuable, when over the strident opposition of the other party you can do the will of more than four in five Americans, it’s time not to break arms but to amputate them. If Thom Tillis, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and whoever else won’t do the will of their constituents — remember; if this bill has 80 percent support nationally it almost assuredly has numbers better than that in the red states — and go along with treating the bill as a privileged motion or instituting the talking filibuster, then the proper response is to take away their office space, suspend their committee assignments, and impose every other punishment imaginable until they cry “Uncle.”

Schumer, McConnell, and Harry Reid certainly didn’t have any concerns with using their power to impose agenda items on their caucus and the body as a whole. In McConnell’s case, there were legitimate questions as to what that agenda really was.

Nothing much has changed, apparently.

And Thune isn’t fooling a soul.

He’s responsible for an absolutely worthless GOP Senate majority, the poor performance of which has utterly demoralized the Republican base when it has the resources to do important, consequential things to preserve or restore our republic and make it so that the radical Left are the ones demoralized in advance of the midterms.

Instead, he’s a step-n-fetch-it for the establishment and corporate class at the expense of the country. And he’s made himself the face of American political failure.

There are no words too harsh for a man like this. Either Thune chooses to stop being that man or he will deserve all the ridicule, opprobrium, and disrespect that comes his way.

Be a leader, Senator. Be a leader and force this bill through or resign your position as majority leader before there is no majority to lead.

READ MORE by Scott McKay:

The Iranians Didn’t Select a Dead Guy as Supreme Leader, Did They?

Five Quick Things: The Grand Senate Bargain?

The Incredibly, Unacceptably Weird James Talarico

Image licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.