Pearl River      Oh, mercy, save us from Trump’s SAVE Act, which is all about restricting access to the ballot, fixing things that are not broken, and maintaining power in the hands of the minority, rather than the majority.  Currently, amid a flurry of preposterous threats by Trump, the bill is bottled up in Congress, because the majority leader of the Senate, South Dakota’s John Thune, says they simply don’t have the votes, provoking a firestorm from the whacky conservative rightwing of the Republican Party.  Thune is also resisting efforts to scuttle the filibuster, a long tradition in that body to block legislation unpopular with one party or another by stopping any business being done through endless talking on the floor of the body until one side or another blinks and caves into the other.

This is a very, very bad bill on so many counts.  Among other things, it would, “…require state-approved identification when voting, proof of citizenship to register and a federal review of voters rolls to purge potentially ineligible voters.”  None of that is good.  States now control voting procedures, as required by the US Constitution.  Many are blocking current attempts by the Justice Department and the administration to access their voting rolls for various purposes, including immigration enforcement.  Reports indicate that “Trump also wants to add a measure that would prohibit most voting by mail and add some transgender bans — an issue that played well politically for him and Republicans in 2024.”

Deploying his usual bully-boy tactics, Trump is employing a de facto one-man filibuster of his own.  He’s threatening to refuse to sign any bill presented to him until the SAVE Act is passed.  In a fiercely contested Senate primary in Texas, he has refused to endorse the incumbent Senator Cornyn against the unscrupulous and formerly impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, unless he agrees to support SAVE.  To save himself, Cornyn, in yet another contemporary profile in the opposite of courage, dutifully changed his position to favor the bill.

Meanwhile, the always subservient Republican majority in the Florida state legislature has now passed a bill at the state level, which might be more constitutional, including some elements of SAVE for elections in 2028.  This end-run approach of using red state legislatures to pilot legislation unable to be moved nationally has become common for the administration.  They have used similar tactics to sue red states to implement quick and friendly settlements that they can’t win otherwise to put in place polices with national implications that their slim majorities can’t make happen in Congress.

Counting on Republican Senators to protect American voting rights just seems crazy, but that seems to be where we stand right now in the struggle to save the last remnants of democracy in the United States.