Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said on March 17 that Republicans would criticize Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections for not backing the SAVE America Act, saying it’s a popular way to protect against election fraud.
“I think that’s a fairly simple position and one Democrats ought to eventually get on board with. But if they don’t ... it’s an issue we will be able to use, I think, in the fall elections,” Thune told Fox News’s Bret Baier on March 17.
The SAVE America Act, or the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, would mandate that Americans prove they are citizens before they register to vote and show identification at polls, among other new requirements.
Thune’s comments come as President Donald Trump and Republicans push to get the measure passed before the 2026 elections. Trump has said that the bill is one of his top legislative priorities and that he won’t sign any other measures into law until it gets passed.
This week, Republicans launched an effort on March 17 to hold the Senate floor and talk for days about the bill in a bid to capture public attention on legislation requiring stricter voter registration rules as Trump pressures Congress to act before November’s midterm elections.
Trump has urged Thune to scrap the legislative filibuster, which triggers a 60-vote threshold in the 100-member Senate, or find another workaround to pass the bill, but Thune has repeatedly said he doesn’t have the votes for that.
Regarding the legislative filibuster, Thune told Fox News, “[It is a] very deeply held view by a lot of Senate Republicans that if the Democrats want to go there, if at some point they decide they want to steal the car, fine, but we’re not going to hand them the keys to do it, and then own all the things that we would enable, all the things that Democrats want to do once they nuke the filibuster.”
“But again, that’s a hypothetical,“ he said. ”We don’t know it’ll happen. And if they get the majorities in the House and Senate and the White House at some point in the future, maybe they go down that path, we don’t know for sure. But I know that right now, there are a majority of Republican senators who don’t want to go down that path.”
Republicans need 60 votes to advance the bill to a final vote, but they hold 53 seats, and all 45 Democrats and both independents who caucus with the Democrats have said they oppose the measure.
On March 17, the Senate voted 51–48 to advance the SAVE Act. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was the only Republican to vote against it.
Democrats have said that the voting act would disenfranchise some voters. Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on March 17 on the floor that the “SAVE Act is not a voter ID bill” and is instead “a voter suppression bill.”
“It could purge millions of American citizens from the voter rolls through a screening algorithm,” he said. “It could disenfranchise over 20 million American citizens. It would kill online voter registration. It would kill vote by mail. It would kill motor voter registration.”
