Republicans, Trump run into Senate roadblock on voter ID bill

Congressional Republicans, President Donald Trump and their shared base of support want to see voter ID legislation become law, but the last barrier is the Senate, where political reality has turned the notion into a pipe dream. 

The GOP’s legislative push to codify more requirements and restrictions surrounding voter registration nearly derailed Congress’ attempt to end the latest partial government shutdown on Tuesday. 

In an unlikely turn of events, like Senate Democrats’ push to save expiring Obamacare subsidies’ during the last funding battle, House Republicans’ desire to attach election integrity legislation, dubbed the SAVE America Act, to the Trump-backed package this week bolted the issue back into the zeitgeist. 

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Trump, who encouraged House Republicans to stand down from their do-or-die demands, renewed his call to pass voter ID legislation while signing the funding package into law on Tuesday.

“We should have voter ID, by the way,” Trump said. “We should have a lot of the things that I think everybody wants to see. Who would not want voter ID? Only somebody that wants to cheat.” 

While several Senate Republicans support what the bill could accomplish, they acknowledge the legislation would die on the floor without a handful of Senate Democrats, who nearly unanimously despise the move.  

“Democrats want to make it easy to cheat,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Fox News Digital. “They don’t want to do anything to secure elections.”

The issue at hand, as has often been the case during Trump’s second term, is the 60-vote filibuster. The president has called on Senate Republicans to eviscerate it several times throughout the last year as the precarious threshold has time and again impeded his agenda. 

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Some Senate Republicans, including Johnson, are mulling turning to the precursor to the modern filibuster: the talking, or standing, filibuster.

The modern filibuster is less strenuous, literally, than the standing filibuster. While today’s standard requires that senators hit at least 60 votes, the standing filibuster demanded that lawmakers debate on the floor, consuming one of the Senate’s most valuable commodities: time.

“The only way that’s going to get passed is if we do a talking filibuster, or we end the filibuster,” Johnson said.

There’s little appetite among Senate Republicans to nuke the filibuster, given that it could play right into the desires of Senate Democrats, who have tried and failed to modify the procedure when they controlled the upper chamber under former President Joe Biden. 

And many acknowledge that the votes simply aren’t there to do so. 

One Senate Republican told Fox News Digital that the “filibuster is not on the table” as pressure mounts to move on the SAVE America Act, but that the legislation would likely get a shot in the upper chamber and earn 51 Republican votes. But, the lawmaker contended, the question was what happened next in the likely event the bill fails.

The notion of turning to the standing filibuster, the physical and original version of the filibuster, was also swiftly sidelined by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who said while there was interest among Republicans to discuss the option, “there weren’t any commitments made.”

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Forcing the standing filibuster would come with its own ramifications in the Senate, given that the most valuable commodity in the upper chamber is floor time.

That’s because of rules that guarantee any senator gets up to two speeches on a bill. That, coupled with the clock being reset by amendments to the bill, means that the Senate could effectively be paralyzed for months as Republicans chip away at Democratic opposition.

“There’s always an opportunity cost,” Thune said.

“At any time there’s an amendment offered, and that amendment is tabled, it resets the clock,” he continued. “The two-speech rule kicks in again. So let’s say, you know, every Democrat senator talks for two hours. That’s 940 hours on the floor.”

Still, some Republicans hope that the bill gets its moment in the Senate.

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who was an original co-sponsor of the bill, told Fox News Digital that he hoped it got a chance on the floor and contended that it was a “very important thing to do.”

“I don’t know,” Schmitt said. “I mean, we’ll never know unless it happens.”

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