WH Pressures Congress to Stuff Anti-Trans Riders into Sweeping Voter Suppression Bill
This is your TPM evening briefing.
‘Best of Trump’ …?
President Trump has been flooding Truth Social in recent days with a series of indecipherable posts that appear to outline his interest in stuffing two anti-trans provisions into the SAVE America Act, a disastrous voter suppression bill that passed the House earlier this year and is currently languishing in the Senate due to filibuster rules.
The bill, in its House-passed form, appears to have almost no support from Senate Democrats (though Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has increasingly proven himself to be a wildcard).
Trump has been pressuring Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE America Act before the midterms for weeks now. To back up a bit — a previous version of the bill passed the House during Joe Biden’s presidency a few years back and was used as a messaging bill for Republicans hoping to spread the myth of non-citizen voting ahead of the 2024 presidential election to give Trump some sort of amorphous, supposedly rampant fraud to point to if he lost the election.
He did not lose and that version of the bill never made it out of the Senate. In recent weeks, a new, more intense form of this legislation, the SAVE America Act — set to disenfranchise even more voters with documentary proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration, mandatory photo ID for casting a ballot and bans on certain types of mail-in voting — was introduced and passed in the House. It now sits in the Senate where it cannot pass due to filibuster rules requiring at least 60 votes for legislation to pass, which it does not have.
But Trump has been pressuring Republican leadership to change filibuster those rules, with one popular idea being to force Democrats to engage in a talking filibuster if they want to block the legislation. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has not been interested in taking such action, fearing it would prevent the Senate from accomplishing anything at all, but everything got even more weird and complicated this week. I’ve unpacked this in Where Things Stand a few times but here is the short version:
Trump wants to endorse someone in the Texas Republican Senate primary for Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) seat. Thune would like Trump to endorse the reliable incumbent, Cornyn. Trump is considering doing that but wants a guarantee that the other candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is very popular among MAGA fans, will drop out of the coming runoff election if he does.
Paxton does not want to do that.
In a tweet earlier this month, Paxton made it clear that he would only drop out of the race for Trump/Cornyn/Thune if the Senate is able to pass the SAVE America Act, reminding Trump that he is annoyed with Thune for not nuking filibuster rules to pass it.
Thune still does not want to change filibuster rules to pass the legislation.
Trump is now upping the pressure and also demanding that confusing provisions be added to the legislation.
In a series of seemingly aimless Truth Social posts over the course of the last week, and in private meetings with House Republicans, Trump has urged Republican lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act with additional provisions that target trans Americans. Specifically, he wants the SAVE America Act to now include non-voting-related bans on trans athletes and gender affirming surgeries for minors. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt ticked off the provisions Trump wants added to the legislation from the White House podium on Tuesday, as well.
“These are called ‘best of Trump.’ We should also add on to this bill. And so what I’ve asked Mike to do is to draw a new one with these few things added and let’s go for the gold. Let’s not just get one, like voter ID,” Trump reportedly told House Republicans in Florida this week. “This is the No. 1 priority.”
Thune is already trying to get out ahead of the matter, telling reporters on the Hill this week that he still does not see a path forward on modifying filibuster rules to pass the legislation in its current form — and expressing that he sees the anti-trans provisions that Trump wants to add to the bill as a House problem, not a Senate one.
“Having studied it and researched it pretty thoroughly, you have to show me how, in the end, it prevails and succeeds. 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,” Thune said. “We can’t find a piece of legislation in history that’s been passed that way.”
…“Those were all things that weren’t part of what they sent over here to us,” Thune told reporters Monday. “Whatever we take up here is an open question now, because the thing we have in front of us is the House message, so it would probably make sense for them to send over another version.”
But Why?
It is still not clear why or how exactly Trump wants these things accomplished. Most House Republican efforts this Congress to pass anti-trans legislation have not gone anywhere. And anti-trans legislation is even more unpopular in the Senate. Per the 19th:
Caius Willingham, a senior policy analyst at Advocates for Trans Equality who frequently works on the Hill, said that there is just not enough support in the Senate to adopt these anti-trans measures. That makes Trump’s fixation on this bill all the more perplexing, he said.
“It seems as if he believes that attaching these anti-trans riders to the SAVE America Act would improve its chances in the Senate,” he said. “Putting those riders into the SAVE America Act would actually turn off more senators than it would inspire them.”
The latest from Politico: Thune eyes action on SAVE America Act next week — without a ‘talking filibuster’
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Rand Paul Predicts ‘Disastrous’ Midterms for GOP
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made the remarks during an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday morning.
“Already, we are behind the eight ball as far as the electoral process,” he said. “I think if you add in high gas prices, high oil prices, and if we are still bombing Iran with kinetic action — people don’t want to call it war — if there’s still kinetic action that causes oil to be over $100, I think you’re going to see a disastrous election.”
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