HUNT VALLEY, Md. (TNND) — Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, expressed support Wednesday for eliminating the filibuster to pass a bill on voting.
He wrote in an op-ed for the New York Post that he would help change the Senate’s rules, which require 60 votes to approve most legislation, to send a version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act to President Donald Trump.
The president has threatened to stop signing off on legislation – including potential funding for the inoperative Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – until he receives a different version of the SAVE Act.
“After careful consideration, I support whatever changes to Senate rules that may prove necessary for us to get the SAVE America Act and homeland security funding past the Democrats’ obstruction, through the Senate, and on the president’s desk for his signature,” Cornyn said.
The SAVE America Act, a variant of the SAVE Act passed by the House last year, would require voters to present proof of citizenship before registering to vote and photo identification when casting ballots. States would also have to provide voter rolls to DHS for citizenship verification and remove noncitizens from their lists.
Trump has demanded that the House consider an updated version of the SAVE America Act that bans mail-in voting and restricts transgender healthcare and athletic competition. It’s unclear, though, whether Speaker Mike Johnson plans to allow a vote on the bill or if Senate Republicans would eliminate the filibuster to approve it.
Senate Democrats have blocked all of the SAVE legislation from advancing. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it “Jim Crow 2.0” following Trump’s Sunday threat to stop signing other bills.
“It would disenfranchise tens of millions of people,” the senator wrote in a social media post. “If Trump is saying he won’t sign any bills until the SAVE Act is passed, then so be it: there will be total gridlock in the Senate.”
The Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy think tank, found in a 2023 study that nine percent of Americans – more than 20 million people – didn’t have citizenship proof on hand.
Republicans have dismissed concerns about the SAVE Act’s potential consequences for legal voters, though, and emphasized how it could protect against noncitizen voting, which is illegal and rare.
“It would make it easy to vote but harder to cheat, by requiring proof of citizenship and voter ID,” Cornyn wrote in his op-ed. “These basic, commonsense protections are massively popular with the American people – and the fact that the radical left apparently sees them as such a threat to their chances in November truly gives their game away.”
Have questions, concerns or tips? Send them to Ray at rjlewis@sbgtv.com.
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