Senate Majority Leader John R. Thune presented himself as the man leading the fight for President Donald J. Trump’s top legislative priority, the SAVE America Act, a comprehensive bill to require voter ID, clean up the voter rolls, and provide modern election security measures.
Trump said about the SAVE Act on Truth Social: “It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE.”
The president is not one for nuance. Thune sleeps hooked up to an IV bag full of nuance.
Complicating passage of the SAVE Act is Thune’s decision to work with Senate Democrats to pass the federal budget at the end of January without funding for the Homeland Security Department, separating that department with its own funding set to expire Feb. 13.
Trump demanded Thune link that DHS funding, which includes Border Patrol, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, and Secret Service—and portions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—to passage of the SAVE America Act. For Thune, it was a bridge too far.
The SAVE America Act did not have grassroots or donor support that was coming to bear on Capitol Hill. Without outside pressure, the bill’s champion, Sen. Michael S. Lee (R.-Utah), cannot whip up the 60 votes he needs to force a floor vote. Senate rules state that senators are either debating or voting. If debate ends, there must be a vote.
Reacting to Trump and Lee, Thune put the SAVE Act on the floor for debate, but without the 60 votes to end debate, it just twists in the wind until the end of the session, when it will expire worthless and alone.
Here, the real pressure comes from the calendar—in this case, Holy Week—and its attendant jet fumes wafting from Reagan National up to Capitol Hill, combined with the whiff of exhaust from the dozens of vehicles idling in the East Plaza, with interns at the wheel waiting to take their masters to the airport.
The senior senator from South Dakota responded to the signal from his tower, and he went to work.
With the Homeland funding, Republican and Democratic senators continued to take to the floor for remarks on the bill, or anything else that came to mind. Just before midnight, the Senate seemed to wind down. The floor was empty and quiet. Then, Thune took the floor at or around 2 a.m.
A Senate majority leader is not a constitutional office. It is a party office, held by a man who was elected on the second ballot, 29-24, but it has its perks. One of them is that he can immediately seize the floor when he wants it and bring up any bill he wants to address.
This time, Thune took the floor and told the presiding officer that debate on the DHS funding had ended. Then, with a handful of senators and staffers on the floor, the presiding officer called the vote on Thune’s Homeland funding bill—which funds virtually the whole department except for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations section.
There was a voice vote, so passage was recorded as unanimous, without any names on the roll call—and with that, Thune was gone.
The Senate returns to business April 14, the Tuesday after Greek Orthodox Easter. The House returns the day before for a roll call vote, which is really just to make sure everyone is back to work.
Before he left town, Speaker J. Michael Johnson (R.-La.) rejected the Thune DHS bill and arranged for the House to pass its own DHS bill that funds the whole department through May 22. It might have been the beginning of negotiations to end the impasse, but alas, Thune and the Senate had already disappeared.