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

GOP senators are considering pushing the SAVE America Act through the complicated budget reconciliation process. But the chamber’s parliamentarian might have other ideas.

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........

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