Senate leaders resist Trump pressure on talking filibuster, SAVE America Act

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Monday that he hopes President Trump will change his mind about not signing bills into law until the SAVE America Act is passed, because he does not see a way to ensure passage.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said his party remains opposed to the bill and that if Mr. Trump follows through on the threat to not sign any bills, “there will be total gridlock in Congress.”

The Senate leaders were responding to Mr. Trump’s social media post on Sunday urging Republicans to use the talking filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast a ballot.

“It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else [and] must go to the front of the line,” Mr. Trump said, using his all-caps style in parts of the post. “I, as president, will not sign other bills until this is passed.”

Mr. Thune, South Dakota Republican, said the president has clarified that he would sign a bill to end the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown if Congress can agree on funding. He also said he hopes the president would want to sign a bipartisan housing package that the Senate worked closely with the White House on and is currently debating.

“I hope at the end of the day that if we can move things across the floor here and actually put legislation on his desk, that he’ll find his way to sign it,” Mr. Thune said.

As for the SAVE America Act, Mr. Thune said he is not convinced the talking filibuster ploy that Mr. Trump and other conservatives want to use to pass the bill — without needing Democrats’ votes — would work.

“Having studied it and researched it pretty thoroughly, you have to show me how, in the end, it prevails and succeeds,” he said. “Because I think what has been promised out there is that it would actually, in the end, get an outcome. And I find it very hard to see that based on actual past experience.”

Mr. Thune said Democrats contemplated using the talking filibuster on a few occasions when they were in the majority, “and they opted against it because they examined it in the same way that we’re examining it.”

The talking filibuster is a Senate rule that forces senators to speak if they want to block a bill and allows for a simple-majority vote when debate is exhausted.

In modern Senate practice, the Senate has ignored that rule and instead uses the cloture process to end debate, which requires 60 votes to successfully invoke and override a filibuster.

Mr. Thune said executing the talking filibuster would require much more party discipline, because the process allows for unlimited debate and amendments that Democrats would exploit.

“You have to have unified support, not only in support of the ultimate goal, which is the SAVE AMERICA Act, but on the process to be able to defeat amendments that would undo the legislation in the first place,” he said. “We can’t find a piece of legislation in history that’s been passed that way.”

Sen. Mike Lee, Utah Republican and lead sponsor of the bill, said earlier Monday on social media that the inability to guarantee an outcome should not be determinative.

“The one thing we know with certainty is that it *won’t* pass if we don’t try. So why not give it a shot?” he said. “Americans deserve nothing less.”

While Senate Republicans have a simple-majority support for the House-passed version of the SAVE America Act, Mr. Trump has panned that bill as “the watered down version” and asked lawmakers to add a ban on mail-in voting, except for military deployment, illness, disability and travel.

The president also wants to add bans on sex reassignment surgeries for transgender children and transgender athletes participating in women’s sports to the bill.

Mr. Thune had planned on holding at least a test vote on the House-passed version of the SAVE America Act, but he said what the Senate takes up now “is an open question,” given the president’s demands.

“It would probably make sense for them to send over another version, yeah,” he said when asked if he would wait on the House to send a revised bill.

Mr. Schumer said the House-passed version is already “a voter suppression bill” that makes it harder for people to register, and now Mr. Trump is promoting a “beefed up” version that would ban vote-by-mail.

“Donald Trump is saying, in effect, unless Congress helps him undermine democracy, he’s prepared to hold the rest of the country hostage,” he said. “This is what he does. He’s a thug. He’s a bully. He can’t ever argue on the merits, so he threatens.”