Senate Could Go Nuclear To Pass SAVE Act

Sources

Carr Smyth, Julie. “The Biggest Change to Voting in Republican Election Bill Could Become a Burden for Many US Voters.” AP News, March 14, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/save-act-documents-requirements-citizenship-voting-congress-dfb43bcdd0255d3665da588a60286b4e.

Congress.Gov. “Filibusters and Cloture in the Senate.” April 7, 2017. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL30360.

Davidson, Roger. “Congress and the President.” In Congress and Its Members. CQ Press, 2025. https://collegepublishing.sagepub.com/products/congress-and-its-members-20-290897.

Dore. “Senate Democrats Oppose SAVE America Act as Republicans Prepare for Floor Vote. What to Know.” CNBC, March 15, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/15/trump-save-america-act-senate-2026-elections.html.

Kane, Paul. “Push for GOP Voting Law Has Many Switching Sides on Filibuster Issue.” The Washington Post, March 14, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/14/senate-filibusters-election-legislation/.

Lau, m. “The Filibuster Explained.” Brennan Center for Justice, October 31, 2020. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/filibuster-explained.

Press Release: February 2026 – Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll. March 2, 2026. https://harvardharrispoll.com/press-release-february-2026/.

Razor. “Capitol Agenda: Thune Kicks off SAVE Showdown.” POLITICO, March 16, 2026. https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/03/16/congress/save-america-act-thune-senate-vote-debate-00829442.

Reynolds, Molly. “Senate Filibuster: What It Is and How to Eliminate It.” Brookings, September 9, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-is-the-senate-filibuster-and-what-would-it-take-to-eliminate-it/.

Transcript

Hi it’s Monday, March 16th, 2026, you’re tuned into Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend, Leeja Miller. This week, while the world watches as the United States upends the geopolitical order and kills and displaces millions while doing so, a quieter though deeply important process will be happening in the US Senate in Washington DC. The Republicans this week will attempt to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or SAVE Act–the bill Trump has touted will “guarantee the midterms” for the Republicans. That alone should tell you the deeply important implications of this act–Trump wants it so bad he’s said he will veto every piece of legislation that comes his way until it’s passed. Understanding how this week will unfold in Congress requires understanding what’s at stake in the SAVE America act and how this could all go nuclear pretty quickly. Today we’re discussing how swaths of eligible voters in America could be disenfranchised, how the movement to abolish the filibuster comes into play, and why, despite all this, over 70% of Americans support the passage of the SAVE Act.

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The contents of the SAVE Act vary depending on who you ask. Republicans will tell you it’s just a simple measure meant to protect against fraudulent voting and to require IDs in order to vote. You have to have an ID to drink or to drive a car, why wouldn’t we require ID’s for something as consequential as voting???? Those who oppose the bill, which is all Democrats in the Senate as well as the majority of voting rights groups who care about peoples’ ability to access their constitutionally protected right to vote, tell a different story. You can read the bill yourself at congress dot gov, and this is why I would always recommend you read the actual bill so you can understand what the words in the bill actually say and not just the spin that various politicians are giving to it. The bill requires that anyone registering to vote in federal elections must provide proof of US citizenship in order to register. It requires states to establish programs to systematically identify people who aren’t US citizens and remove them from voter rolls using, among other things, data from the Department of Homeland Security, which notoriously misidentifies US citizens as undocumented immigrants regularly. It also empowers DHS to share information across federal agencies and conduct investigations into anyone identified as being fraudulently registered to vote. It then provides a private right of action, that is a right for an individual to sue the people in charge of voter registration if they register someone who fails to present documentary proof of US citizenship. Not to sue someone who registers a non-citizen, but to sue someone for monetary damages for the act of registering ANYONE without first obtaining proof of their US citizenship, which adds an incredible amount of pressure on top of any election officials currently full plate, dealing with ongoing threats of violence and preparing for possible federal occupation of polling places, etc. It means election officials are going to err on the side of caution and refuse to register anyone whose documents aren’t perfectly in order. If you’ve ever stood in line at the DMV you know peoples’ documents are rarely perfectly in order. Not only that but there are CRIMINAL penalties, on top of the private right of action, that could be taken against election officials for registering anyone without first checking their citizenship documents, even if they register actual US citizens without first checking their documentation.

And there is a lot of gray area and room for error when it comes to the allowed citizenship documents. A US passport is the most straightforward, but of course costs money, takes a long time to obtain, and MOST US citizens do not have one. You can show your birth certificate, but many people don’t have easy access to that–do you know where your copy of your birth certificate is right now? It’s not fast to get one, especially if you don’t live in the county where you were born. Plus, there are many instances where a birth certificate won’t work, because women who get married and change their last names will then not match their name on their birth certificate. Plus, trans people will not have names or genders that match what’s listed on their birth certificates. The act claims Real IDs will work to prove citizenship, but only the ones that indicate citizenship on them, which is only true in a couple states. A US military ID will work, so long as you have a record of service showing your place of birth is in the US. And on and on. As you can see, the confusion that these ID laws will create will mean that many many people will attempt to register to vote and be turned away, even if they have the right to vote. And the bill provides for zero additional federal funding to help states implement these new more onerous requirements to voter registration, requirements that will take more of the already spread-thin time and energy for election officials.

And that’s an important point when you think about the other justifications some Republicans are giving for these bills–the idea that well we require an ID to drink and an ID to drive, why wouldn’t we require an ID to vote. The answer to that is of course that you do not have a constitutionally protected right to drink alcohol. And your right to vote does not pose an immediate bodily risk to you or the people around you like drinking or driving or even owning a firearm does. It is a fiercely protected civic right that you have in a so-called democracy that if you want your voice to be heard in the form of a vote then you should be able to do so. Throughout history, attempts at blocking people from voting have done nothing but push us away from that democratic ideal, whether it’s barring women from voting or charging poll taxes to vote. Today, the SAVE Act is being pushed for under the guise of protecting voting integrity, but the reality is that fraud in voting in the US is incredibly rare. Our voting is already successfully being protected. It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote. There is no level of voter fraud happening in this country that is having any impact on the outcome of our elections–unless you count floods of misinformation and foreign monied interests invading every aspect of our lives, but of course the SAVE Act does nothing to fix that. They are using the specter of fraudulent alien voters to ensure that as few people as possible vote. And Trump believes this is essential for Republican prospects at midterms this year and in 2028 because there is the ongoing theory that the fewer people vote, the more beneficial that is for republicans. That is a disputed idea, and there are many Republicans in Congress who do not support the SAVE Act because the reality is that some of the provisions of this bill will hurt rural voters, and conservative voters, too. Not to mention the fact that this bill tramples all over states rights, and states have historically and by order of the Constitution had wide control over the way they manage their elections. Yes it is IN the constitution that states get to choose how elections are run. Congress has the ability to make rules about it from time to time, but the power to manage elections originates in the states.

And because of Republican’s thin majority in Congress, especially in the Senate where this drama is playing out–the House already passed its version of the SAVE Act–the fact that there is bipartisan opposition to this act means that it’s doomed to failure. There are only 53 Republicans in the Senate. So WHY are they even bothering with all this bluster in the Senate? And why is this getting so much attention when its doomed to fail? To answer those questions we have to understand two things: Trump’s sway over Congress, and the fight to end the filibuster.

Trump exerts a lot of control over Congress considering it’s supposed to be a separate branch of government. And in some ways his control over Congress is without precedent–it’s rare to see a group of politicians, even from the same party, in such lock step behind a president. Politicians are an inherently power hungry bunch, you don’t run for Congress without having a little of that in you. So historically they aren’t as quick to roll over and play dead as the Republicans in this Congress do. Any overreach by Trump into what should be Congressional power and they do nothing about it, over and over again. One angry call from Trump and they’re willing to flip flop in indefensible ways. It’s really abnormal that so many politicians are so willing to cede so much of their constitutionally protected power. On the other hand, it is really typical for the President of the United States to play an informal role in influencing what happens in Congress. The Constitution gives the President certain formal abilities to influence what’s happening in Congress. Specifically, the president has the veto power, so legislation that’s been passed by Congress can still ultimately fail if the President vetoes it and then Congress can’t come up with the 2/3rd vote needed to pass the bill over the President’s veto. The Veto has become less popular as a presidential tool in recent decades. And then there’s the state of the union, the Constitutionally prescribed time for the President to tell Congress how things are going and how they should fix it. But of course that’s become nothing more than a dog and pony show with no actual significance beyond giving the President a yearly opportunity to blather on and make all of Congress sit and listen to him. So it is through informal channels that presidents typically attempt to influence what Congress does. They do this by lobbying Congressional leaders to get bills on their agenda. They do this by making fervent calls at the last minute to the members who are holdouts on major legislation, that’s a Trump favorite. They influence the passage or amending of bills by the mere threat of an eventual veto, without having to actually do any vetoing because why pass something that doesn’t have enough support to overcome a veto then. They influence individual members through patronage–flights on air force one, campaign money or resources, access to information, closer relationships, potentially future jobs in the administration or elsewhere–some of this is unspoken of course but the revolving door in Washington is well-known and the President would obviously have a lot of sway if they give you a letter of recommendation for a future job. And then of course the president has leverage they can use to push through certain legislation. That’s what Trump is using right now. The idea is that the president will take a bill on a certain issue and use other bills as a means of pushing through that single issue unrelated bill. So Trump is applying leverage in the SAVE Act by saying he’ll veto every single bill that hits his desk until the SAVE Act is passed. This is one of those things in politicking that is really common but also to those of us who have to watch these people conniving on OUR tax dollars is really infuriating to see. And it is through all these various tools that Trump is able to pull all the strings and have such outsized influence over members of Congress. Various presidents throughout history have used these tools to varying degrees. Obama got a lot of flack, for example, for NOT being good at massaging his relationships in Congress. And Trump is of course an incredibly transactional person who has learned how to find and push on pressure points to make people uncomfortable enough to do whatever he wants them to do. Whether that’s withholding endorsements, making mean phone calls and yelling, flashing shiny campaign contributions, sic-ing his followers on you through negative social media posts, or being willing to go further on his threats and make good on those threats than most sane people ever would. That can be an effective negotiating skill, it can also win you a lot of enemies and start world war three. And so, because Trump is convinced that the SAVE Act is going to win Republicans the midterms, an idea that is very much not certain given how many rural voters and married conservative women would be impacted by this Act, but because this one deranged man is convinced of it, and is applying ungodly amounts of pressure on members of Congress, including John Thune, the Senate majority leader who is leading the SAVE Act charge this week, that means that while war rages in the middle east, while DHS continues to be shut down, our Senate is going to be spending the majority of its time over the next two weeks likely debating this act that is bad for Democracy and almost certainly won’t pass. UNLESS. Unless they choose the nuclear option.

That’s where the filibuster comes in. Here’s a refresher, because I can never remember the intricacies of it either. Okay so a filibuster is basically an endless debate, and it’s exclusively an issue in the Senate. A Senator is able to stand up and speak for hours and hours and hours and basically bar a bill from passing by just delaying and delaying and wasting time. During a filibuster they cannot go to the bathroom, they cannot eat, they can only drink water or milk. They can be aided by their fellow party members who can ask questions or otherwise briefly delay the proceedings so the Senator can take a break. Senators generally have two opportunities to filibuster–first when there’s a motion to proceed, that’s a motion made by a Senator to get the senate to vote to proceed to debate the bill, and then the vote on the bill itself. The Senate procedural rules determine how this all works. And the only thing that can stop a Senator from continuing is what is called “cloture.” A vote of 60 Senators who decide that the person needs to shut up and they are ready to proceed to a vote. If there are not 60 senators willing to vote to end a filibuster, then the filibuster can continue indefinitely. That is called a talking filibuster, the classic case of a Senator standing up and speaking for hours and hours. This was famously used for very racist ends, the person who holds the record for the longest filibuster is Strom Thurmond who spoke for 24 hours to prevent passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. No Corey Booker’s stunt speaking for 25 hours recently was not technically a filibuster, look it up.

That is not what happens anymore. At this point, Senate procedure has adapted so that votes aren’t even held unless it is certain that there is cloture and any filibuster would be swiftly ended. If you don’t have cloture, you don’t go ahead with a vote. So even though many of the bills being introduced in the Senate, including the SAVE Act, technically only need 51 Senators to pass, a bare majority, the threat of a filibuster, and the required 60 votes needed to end the filibuster, means that really every bill needs the support of 60 Senators in order to pass, unless it falls into one of a NUMBER of exceptions which is more detail than I think we need to understand what’s going on.

This has resulted in an incredible amount of gridlock in the Senate, because instead of having open debate on the floor before the American people, there are back room deals, discussions off the record, lots of leveraging happening behind the scenes, and mostly a lot of nothing getting passed. It hasn’t always been like this. The original Senate had a rule that basically meant that it just took a bare majority vote to end debate and move forward with a vote. Then, in the early 1800s, Aaron Burr, in his infinite wisdom, then the Vice President, decided that that rule could be done away with because it was redundant. I’m fuzzy on the exact details around his reasoning, you’ll have to ask a historian, but the impact of getting rid of that original rule that ended debate with a simple majority vote meant that for a long time there was no means by which to end debate in the Senate. It could just go on forever. Which is why cloture was introduced in the early 1900s, thus creating the filibuster as we know it today. And so in order to avoid the whole mess of a filibuster, the Senate uses various tactics that kind of go against the whole idea that Congress is supposed to be a forum for public debate among our elected officials. Instead they introduce various amendments to existing bills based on back door discussions to try to make more people happy enough to the bill to get it passed. Or they engage in their own kind of leverage, remember Trump is saying he’ll veto everything that hits his desk until the SAVE Act is passed, well Senators do this by saying hey I won’t vote for this bill unless you support these other bills I care about, for example. Or they’ll circumvent the whole process by creating behemoth budget and reconciliation bills, which are exceptions that are not allowed to be filibustered, and shoving in a bunch of unrelated shit to try to get it through that way. And so because of ALL this, there are a lot of people, on both sides of the aisle, who are in favor of reforming the filibuster or getting rid of it altogether. But often, the people who are in favor of getting rid of the filibuster are whomstever happens to be in charge at any given moment. Because of course getting rid of the filibuster is going to benefit the majority, who would just need to get a simple majority to pass legislation and wouldn’t have to sit and listen to hours of filibustering or do workarounds to avoid it. Back in 2022, Democrats were gung ho about doing away with the filibuster when they were trying to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights bill. Today, there are a lot of Republicans pushing to get rid of it, including Trump–which is important given what I’ve already told you about Trump’s ability to pressure Congress to do what he wants them to do. However, getting rid of the filibuster would require amending the Senate’s procedural rules, which requires a 2/3rds majority vote to amend. There’s nowhere near enough Senators willing to make that change. A lot of them know that what may benefit them now would come back to bite them if Democrats take back control–something Trump seems completely unconcerned about in any aspect of the changes he’s making to the presidency. It is also strategic to keep the filibuster in place–then whoever is in the majority can blame the minority party for gumming up the system and holding back legislation that the American people desperately want.

And so, moving forward this week, we are going to see a lot of hubbub in the Senate over a bill that will not pass, and a lot of back and forth over doing away with the filibuster which, if done via amending the Senate procedural rules, will never happen. Love that. Love this timeline. There is always, however, the nuclear option. John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, is facing a TON of pressure from Trump to get the filibuster out of the way so that the SAVE Act can move forward. Thune has shown support for getting rid of the filibuster, reasoning that well the Democrats will do it the second they have the chance to, so might as well beat them to it. Of course, that logic would mean that every past Congress had the same decision and yet decided not to do away with the filibuster so it doesn’t really hold water. But even if Thune is in favor of getting rid of the filibuster, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll choose the nuclear option. But it is there. The nuclear option would involve him calling a point of order and just unilaterally deciding that for this bill, cloture just requires a simple majority vote. This would then set a precedent that would have cascading effects because once he does this then every future vote it could be determined that cloture is a simple majority, thus if Democrats ever regain control, if there is a US Congress in a few years at all, then Democrats would have that precedent to point to and it would effectively mean the death of the 60 vote cloture rule. This has been done in the past in more limited ways. Back in 2017, Mitch McConnell chose the nuclear option when Democrats were attempting to filibuster the confirmation of Trump’s Supreme Court pick Niel Gorsuch. He set the precedent that now Supreme Court nominations just need a simple majority to pass, no more filibustering. This was of course after he entirely blocked Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland from ever making it out of the Judiciary Committee for a vote to begin with. In case you forgot that Mitch McConnell is a fucking slimeball. McConnell’s choice of the nuclear option, which is limited just to Supreme Court nominees, means that it is much easier for presidents to appoint Supreme Court justices along party lines with no need to pick someone that will appeal to Senators from both parties. If John Thune decides to bend to Trump’s will and choose the nuclear option to get the SAVE Act passed, it could likely have more profound impacts, because it would end the filibuster on legislation, not just on the Senate’s appointment powers. So on the one hand, the filibuster or threat of the filibuster can cause extreme partisanship gridlock because nothing gets done because of the constant looming threat of the filibuster. On the other hand, without the filibuster, it becomes a hell of a lot easier for the majority party to pass more and more legislation, which could create sweeping changes every four years as one party comes in and undoes everything the other party did, and back and forth forever. There are other options available to weaken or modify the power of the filibuster in ways that could provide a middle ground. One potential reform is to limit the filibuster just to the actual vote on the bill, so there are no more filibusters on the motion to proceed to a vote, which removes one of the hurdles to getting legislation passed. Then there is the talking filibuster, bringing that back, making it a requirement that if a party wants to filibuster a bill they have to actually show up and present to the American people their argument for why the bill shouldn’t stand. They have to, you know, do their fucking job. This would of course gum up the workings of the Senate because it would open up the opportunity for Senators to talk and talk for hours on end, but it would at least partially help to bring the legislative process out into the open for the American people. Instead of backdoor deals and lobbying and amendments and processes that the American people aren’t privy to, they would have to at least give us a good reason, show up, do the work of gumming up our legislative process. Instead of just threatening to vote against something or not reach cloture so nothing happens at all. It would bring back some robust dialogue in the Senate where currently there is very little. This would, of course, require agreement by 2/3rds of Senators to change the Senate rules, and that seems like a fucking pipe dream at this point. So instead we’re stuck with the system as it is, with the only option out of it popularly termed the “nuclear option.” Which feels fitting considering the times we are currently in, I guess.

So we, the people, but also most Senators at this point, don’t actually know the exact next steps that John Thune has planned in the Senate. He has indicated that he will likely open the floor for debate on Tuesday, in a workaround that I frankly don’t fully understand, nor do the reporters I’ve been following, nor, it seems, do the Senators themselves–Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, declined to comment to reporters last week because she didn’t have enough clarity on the mechanics of the debate, according to Politico. I genuinely could not find a clear explanation on this specific senate procedure, because turns out this shit is convoluted as hell, but basically it will allow for debate to move forward with a simple majority vote, and then both Republicans and Democrats will have opportunity to speak, and there may be amendments proposed by both sides. Specifically Trump is gunning for even more messy and controversial and unrelated amendments to be added onto the coattails of this bill, including bans on mail-in voting, a ban on gender affirming surgery, and a ban on trans women in sports. These amendments would require 60 votes to approve and will likely fail, but it's going to lead to hours and hours and hours of debate, likely very late nights, and it will possibly stretch on for weeks. But it does give Americans the rare opportunity to actually hear on the floor of the Senate what our elected officials believe and what they support, not in the form of a press release or a statement to the media but instead in the good old fashioned form of debate on the floor of the Senate. Call me old fashioned but I do like to see our lawmakers actually doing their jobs in the public. Which might actually present a benefit to the public because it turns out according to a Harvard/Harris poll from March 2nd 71% of voters support the SAVE America act. I’m not sure that’s so much an indication of the public’s support for the actual text of the bill but rather an indication of how much better at messaging the Republicans are, because I find it hard to believe that that many people in America would support a bill with as wide-ranging consequences that would disenfranchise so many groups if they actually knew what was in it. Maybe if our Senators were forced to actually speak on it and debate about it the public would be able to access more information beyond the easy talking points being fed to them by the Republicans. But maybe that’s a pipe dream too.

So if you turn on CSPAN this week you might actually see Senators speaking instead of the usual procedural silence. What a thrill. Either way, this bill isn’t passing unless Thune chooses the nuclear option, so keep your eyes peeled for that and know that if he does go that way, something that feels increasingly possible as Trump continues to spiral further and further out of control, that will mean a sea change for how our Congress functions going forward, not to mention, of course, the deep consequences for our democracy that would reverberate across the country if the SAVE Act were to go into effect.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from last week about Christian Nationalism and Pete Hegseth’s Holy War.