The Republicans’ Flimsy Plan to Pass Their Terrible Voter ID Bill

As his party’s prospects in the November midterms sink in concert with his approval ratings, President Trump has been fuming at Senate Republicans to nuke the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act, a suite of restrictions on voting in federal elections that could effectively disenfranchise millions of voters. Majority Leader John Thune isn’t budging, for now, but he may attempt to placate Trump and MAGA hard-liners with a complicated workaround.

The SAVE America Act mandates that voters prove citizenship when they vote, and in all but five states a driver’s license would not satisfy that requirement. It would also tighten rules on mail-in voting and require states to submit voter rolls to a federal database to check voter citizenship (even though cases of noncitizens voting are incredibly rare). The bill sailed through the GOP-controlled House last month before stalling in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes—and thus some Democratic support—to overcome the filibuster.

The Republicans are thus attempting to shoehorn the bill’s key provisions into the budget reconciliation process, which would only require a simple majority of 51 votes to pass. But using this maneuver won’t be a panacea—in fact, some conservatives grumble it will doom their efforts to make the SAVE America Act the law of the land. “It’s hard to imagine how the SAVE America Act could be passed through reconciliation,” GOP Senator Mike Lee wrote on social media last week. “And by ‘hard’ I mean ‘essentially impossible.’”

Given that the bill focuses on voting laws, not funding levels, it seems highly unlikely to pass muster with the rules that govern this special process. Reconciliation is typically employed as a tool to approve a president’s budgetary priorities without input from the other party; it was last used to pass Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which dramatically slashed social spending and extended certain tax breaks. But let’s consider how Republicans might go about it.

Any discussion of reconciliation requires some mind-numbing discussion of Senate operating procedure. So, to paraphrase Olivia Newton-John—or Dua Lipa, depending on your generation—Let’s get technical. Reconciliation allows the majority to avoid the filibuster for certain legislation. It first requires the majority party in both chambers of Congress to draft and adopt a budget resolution, which will lay out the guidelines for crafting the eventual bill.

Leaders of the House and Senate Budget Committee have tentatively begun this process; as Senate Committee Chair Lindsey Graham recently wrote on social media, “The reconciliation train is leaving the station.” He has also said that, along with approving such priorities as increasing funding for homeland security, reconciliation could be used to “improve voter integrity,” a nod to the SAVE America Act.

However, there is a major catch: A reconciliation bill must be explicitly budget-related, permissible only for changes to the debt limit, revenues, and direct spending. Any provision that is not directly related to the budget is thus subject to removal under the “Byrd rule.” If a senator raises a point of order that a provision is extraneous, the parliamentarian could issue guidance urging its removal. Even before the legislation is formally considered, the Senate parliamentarian advises senators on whether there are portions that could violate the rule, a process cutely known as the “Byrd bath.”

Therein lies the rub for an effort to include the text of the SAVE America Act in a reconciliation bill: It probably would get washed out in the Byrd bath. The bill is largely regulatory, regarding how states administer elections. “These changes don’t really have an impact on the deficit that aren’t more than just sort of incidental to the provision,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institute.

The guidance of the parliamentarian is not binding, and in theory, the Senate Republican majority could choose to ignore or overrule that ruling. But Thune has previously likened this option to “killing the filibuster,” and has recently indicated that he would respect any parliamentarian decision in a future reconciliation bill.

It’s not unusual for senators to write legislation in such a way as to circumvent the rules outlined by budget reconciliation rules. Most recently, Senate Republicans used a complicated maneuver to write the One Big Beautiful Bill Act such that it appeared not to add to the deficit, and thus did not violate the Byrd rule.

Matthew Glassman, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, said that Republican lawmakers could find a way to argue that the SAVE America Act would have an impact on the budget, such as conditioning federal dollars to states on implementing its provisions. But that might be a tough argument for Republicans to make. “On the other hand, the parliamentarian might look at it and say, ‘Yeah, but the [SAVE America Act] is going to affect every voting-age adult,’” said Glassman. “So the preponderance of this is really an impact that’s nonbudgetary in nature.”

This is a lesson Democrats learned the hard way when they were in the majority. In 2021, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough ruled against the Democrats’ efforts to include immigration reform in a massive social spending bill, arguing that it would only have an incidental budgetary impact. (That measure, known as the Build Back Better plan, was torpedoed by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin just weeks after McDonough’s third ruling against including immigration policy in the reconciliation process.)

The biggest defenders of the SAVE America Act appear to recognize that reconciliation could be a major dead end for the bill. Lee, one of the most vocal proponents of the measure, wrote on social media that “we already know how the parliamentarian is going to rule on that.” “She will rule that SAVE America cannot be done through reconciliation,” Lee wrote. “So unless Senate Republicans are prepared to overrule her—which we have the power to do, even though we far too rarely do so—then that’s the end of the matter.”

Lee is among hard-line conservatives who have entreated Republican leadership to impose a “talking filibuster,” with the goal of wearing out Democrats by forcing them to hold the floor indefinitely to try to block the bill. But this would also allow Democrats to force difficult amendment votes and jam up Senate business for weeks or even months. Thune rejected this strategy, instead choosing to open an extended debate that began on March 17—an effort to show that Republicans are taking this issue seriously, even if it won’t ultimately pass.

Glassman theorized that Senate Republicans may be aware of the “downstream effects” of functionally eliminating the filibuster—namely, a future Democratic-led Senate taking advantage of majoritarian rule to carry out its own legislative priorities. “They’re not going to go and blow up the Senate just to do this. The president might want to, and there might be some senators who want to, but I think enough senators find value in the filibuster and the restrictions on majoritarian legislating in the Senate,” he said.

So the value in trying to insert the SAVE America Act into reconciliation could be to appease the president and indicate effort to pass the legislation, while allowing the parliamentarian to ensure it isn’t included in the final measure. “There’s certainly some insulation from politics,” said Binder, “where the majority might want to hide behind a ruling.”