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Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is again urging Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to bring the Save America Act to the Senate floor “today,” asserting that the already House-passed bill to ensure election integrity would ultimately pass the Senate.
“I respectfully, but very strongly, disagree with my colleague from South Dakota” that the Save America Act could pass the Senate, Lee told Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle on Tuesday.
While the House-passed bill enjoys a simple majority in the Senate, Lee observed that Republicans are still “about 10 votes shy of achieving cloture.”
Nevertheless, the Utah senator explains that “there are other ways of breaking a filibuster that don’t involve resort to cloture.”
“You don’t actually have to have 60 votes to pass a bill, you just have to have 60 votes to force cloture,” he continued. “But you can break a filibuster through other means.”
Lee said he prefers – for this particular bill, the House-passed Save America Act – to put the legislation on the floor.
As passed by the House, the Save America Act simply requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID when you do vote. Another version of the bill added bans on mail-in voting, men in women’s sports, and transgender medical treatments for children.
Lee said a simple majority in the Senate already supports the House-passed bill.
“You put that on the floor today,” he explained. “If the majority leader were to announce we’re going to debate this until we pass it, we would get to the point of passage. You can’t do this all the time, because it would take a lot of time.”
Lee explained that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed in this way as well.
“They were about 30 votes shy of cloture – we’re only 10 votes short – but the majority leader at the time, Mike Mansfield from Montana, to his credit, said, you know what, we’re 30 votes shy of cloture, but we’re going to debate this bill until it passes,” the senator recalled. “And you know what happened? That bill got more popular, those who were obstructing it got less popular, they started negotiating the terms of their exit ramp, they negotiated changes to the text that made them feel better about it, to help them save face. It ended up passing.”
Lee asserted, however, that passing a bill in this way “takes legislative courage,” adding, “that’s what we need in the Senate.”
During an interview on Fox News’ Special Report, Thune repeated what he has been saying all along – that his conference does not have enough votes to bypass the filibuster to pass the bill.
“The only way you can get … this done is to nuke the legislative filibuster, and that is not something that we have anywhere close to the votes to do,” Thune told host Bret Baier.
Lee vehemently disagrees, however.
“We could pass it,” he persisted. “Don’t fall for the hype that this is undoable. It’s only undoable if we choose not to go to the effort. I don’t say that about every bill, but I do say that about a bill that enjoys the support of somewhere between 70 and 80% of Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike.”
In early February, CNN data analyst Harry Enten delivered results of a Pew poll that found widespread support for the SAVE America Act, with 95% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats backing the bill.
When race is a factor, the poll showed 85% of whites, 82% of Latinos, and 76% of black Americans support the legislation.
“It’s not controversial,” Enten emphasized.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) also urged Senate Republicans to pass the Save America Act.
“All that bill does on its face, the current version, is it requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID when you show up to do so,” Johnson told Fox News on Monday. “That’s common sense. That’s a 90-10 issue in public opinion polling, and yet no Democrat will go along with it. So we’re gonna have to do it on our own.”
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