OPINION:
The establishment, for some reason, doesn’t want the SAVE America Act. It’s one of the few legislative ideas capable of winning the support of 3 out of 4 members of the public, but it’s still being declared dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. Specifically, the House-passed bill can’t clear the world’s most exclusive country club.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, conceded defeat Tuesday. “We don’t have the votes either to proceed to get on a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one if we got on it. That’s just a function of math. There isn’t anything I can do about that,” he told reporters.
Mr. Thune intends to hold a performative vote next week, understanding that Democrats and a handful of liberal Republicans will consign the proposal to oblivion on a procedural vote. He needs only 50 votes to force Democrats to make their obstruction a spectacle for all to see. They would have to stand in the upper chamber, yapping for hours on end, around the clock, for a week or more on the topic.
Donald Trump proved he is serious by saying he won’t sign any other legislation until the SAVE America Act reaches his desk. “We’re going to push them to get it done because I don’t think you can politically exist if you’re not going to do voter ID. I don’t think the people of this country will stand for it. … It will guarantee the midterms,” the president said at a gathering of House Republicans in Florida.
The Senate leader is also desperate to have the president’s endorsement for the reelection of Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a fair-weather Republican facing a challenge on the right from state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Mr. Paxton said he would consider ceding the Republican nomination to Mr. Cornyn if the SAVE America Act becomes law.
That’s the level of hardball at play. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained the urgency by saying, “The greatest way to disenfranchise American citizens from voting in American elections is to allow illegal aliens to vote, which is what Democrats want to do. We see it taking place in Democratic jurisdictions at the state and local level across this country.”
Leftists swear illegal aliens never vote, but ICE keeps producing evidence that they do. Mahady Sacko, a citizen of Mauritania, was just caught participating in every presidential election in Pennsylvania since 2008. This happens because the registration system is rigged to allow noncitizens to vote just by checking a box affirming their eligibility.
Lest there be any doubt about who is responsible, Virginia’s newly empowered Democratic supermajority last week sent House Bill 968 to Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger. The measure outlaws the traditional method of counting ballots by hand, with both Republican and Democratic observers guarding against hanky-panky.
When it takes effect, this statute will require tallying votes by scanning machine only, meaning the accuracy of election results would rest on the reliability of software code that nobody can see. It’s a giant leap away from transparency and accountability.
Democrats aren’t shy about what they are doing. They know that if the SAVE America Act is adopted, states will have to clean up their voter rolls, and suddenly it will be a lot more difficult for residents of graveyards to vote for liberal candidates in Chicago.
Republican survival depends on restoring election integrity. Mr. Thune must stop protecting milquetoast members of his caucus from being exposed by their vote against it.
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