House Speaker Mike Johnson has provided a big update this week on the SAVE America Act.
Johnson recently met with President Donald Trump to discuss the bill and the importance it will have on ensuring election integrity across the country.
During an interview on Fox News, the Speaker revealed that the U.S. House will pass the SAVE America Act “one more time” through a budget reconciliation process.
“The big urgency is to get SAVE America passed. The president has that as a top priority, and so do I,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s approach would attempt to overcome that problem by including the SAVE America Act in a budget reconciliation bill.
That “will be the way to get it through the Senate and finally to the president’s desk,” Johnson said.
The reconciliation push would almost certainly fail in the Senate, which has strict rules limiting what can be included in budget bills.
It wouldn’t be the first time the bill failed to ram through the U.S. Senate.
But House Republicans are not backing down.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) bashed his counterparts in the Senate for not supporting the SAVE America Act.
“Are you that weak? That’s my question to any Republican senator — are you that weak? To where if you vote for a valid ID to be shown to vote, you’re gonna get beat in your home state?” Comer said during an appearance on Fox News’s “The Big Weekend Show.”
“I mean, if you’re that weak, you don’t need to be a United States senator,” he added.
“All that I’m hearing from the Senate leadership is that they don’t have the votes,” Comer said, unless Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is “talking exclusively” with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
“Not only do they not have 60 votes, they don’t have 50 votes — which I don’t believe that,” he added, referring to a simple majority vote that would occur if senators voted to eliminate the filibuster, as pushed by President Trump.
Despite this, it does not appear that Senate GOP Leader John Thune is going to flex his political muscle to get the SAVE America Act passed.
According to multiple sources cited by the Daily Caller, Leader Thune acknowledged during a Republican lunch meeting that some GOP senators oppose Trump so strongly that they would never support the legislation regardless of its merits.
The alleged remark came during a discussion about the SAVE America Act, an election integrity bill championed by Trump allies and sponsored in the Senate by Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee.
Several sources familiar with the meeting confirmed to The Daily Caller that tensions escalated as lawmakers debated the bill’s prospects.
One source told the outlet that the reported exchange “totally happened.”
Thune’s office strongly disputed the account.
“This is a baseless claim, and it is unequivocally untrue,” a spokesperson for the majority leader told the Daily Caller.
The disagreement reportedly unfolded during a contentious conversation involving Lee, Thune and Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn.
According to sources familiar with the meeting, Cornyn – who lost his primary earlier this month to Trump-backed Texas AG Ken Paxton – and Thune questioned Lee’s strategy for advancing the legislation.
Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio first reported the confrontation publicly.
Desiderio wrote on X that Republican senators confronted Lee during the closed-door lunch over his push for the SAVE America Act.
He described the meeting as a “pile-on” against the Utah senator.
According to Desiderio’s reporting, some senators argued that Trump had been led to believe the legislation could pass the Senate, creating frustration when that particular outcome appeared unlikely.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
