In his prime-time nationwide address Thursday evening, President Donald J. Trump cut to the chase on why Democrats—and a ragtag handful of RINOs—continue to oppose the SAVE America Act. He noted that while the legislation would shore up our nation’s election integrity (which currently is riddled with more holes than a block of Swiss cheese at Whole Foods), there’s actually only one reason any member of the U.S. Senate would vote against it.
Speaking directly to Capitol Hill foot-draggers, President Trump—to use the popular Alabama phrase—got the hay down where the goats could get at it.
“The only reason you wouldn’t want to do it is because you want to cheat,” he declared to his nationwide audience (except the literally dozens of people still watching CBS-TV and ABC-TV, networks that opted not to carry Mr. Trump’s clarion call to end voter fraud.) Democrats, RINOs, CBS-TV, and the Disney/ABC gang want illegals and ineligible residents of blue states and sanctuary cities to continue helping to skew the outcome of our once sacrosanct electoral integrity. And they ridicule or censor anyone who contends there is no electoral cheating. Period. End of story.
Because radical Democrat policies are so bad, and their candidates are so pathetic (read Graham Platner or Abdul El-Sayed), they can’t get elected any other way than to block the SAVE America Act, which has but one mission: to ensure election integrity…meaning all voters must produce ID and must be actual American citizens, rather than blow-ins from the Biden years.
Needing 60 votes in the U.S. Senate to become law, the SAVE America Act appeared to be permanently stalled following its passage in the House. While every single Democrat predictably stood squarely against the legislation, four of the 53 Senate Republicans also voted against a procedure to add it to a budget reconciliation measure in the upper chamber: Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and sore loser Thom Tillis of North Carolina all turned thumbs down.
This unconscionable betrayal of America’s voters was accompanied by a baker’s dozen of weak excuses why these GOP Lilliputians cast their lot with Chuck Schumer and his pro-illegal Democrat troops…the lamest of which was offered by Murkowski, who cried crocodile tears because “many of my fellow Alaskans are not on the road system and they’d have to buy plane tickets and possibly even stay in hotels in order to register to vote.” (Apparently, Lisa has not yet heard of the invention of a sleek cross-country travel device which originated in her state about 200 years ago: the dog sled.)
All of this handwringing allowed Senate Democrats to portray the SAVE America Act as Dead On Arrival with the appearance of bipartisan opposition; the tepid utterances of Majority “Leader” John Thune didn’t help, either: he would occasionally pop up at news conferences to add his perspective that “we simply don’t have the votes to pass SAVE America.” Profiles in Jell-O.
However, the forces of the hard Left and media (but I repeat myself) in our country overlooked the real go-to guy in Congress: U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson. The representative from Louisiana’s 4th Congressional District took time out from barnstorming the nation on behalf of GOP candidates in the midterm elections to announce that the SAVE America Act is far from dead.
On the Salem News program This Week on Capitol Hill with Tony Perkins, Speaker Johnson announced that in the week ahead he’ll move forward with a very aggressive agenda, including attaching the SAVE America Act to what’s being called Reconciliation 3.0: “We’re pushing forward the America First agenda but sadly, the Democrats don’t want any part of it so we Republicans have got to do it on our own.”
On SAVE America, the Louisiana Republican was blunt: “Desperate times call for desperate measures. The reason we have to get Reconciliation 3.0 done is because it is the vehicle for us to deliver the SAVE America Act to the President’s desk. It is the only way to do it because there’s no way to get 60 votes in the Senate. The Democrats won’t go along with that, and we’ve only got 53 Republicans.”
So Johnson says the GOP is going to make the legislation a reconciliation matter, tying it to the budget with the fiscal impact, which will qualify it in that process. SAVE America will then be able to pass the U.S. Senate with only 51 votes, and the Speaker will have thus solved this problem.
I have written more than once how much all Americans should admire Speaker Mike Johnson. As we celebrate our 250th year as a nation, few leaders have been more principled or stood taller in advocating for what is good and true and indispensable in America.
When you head to the polls in November, add a little spring in your step because Mike Johnson—handcuffed by one of the slimmest majorities in House history—managed to pull the cumbersome levers of Congress to finally guarantee that the voters lined up in front of you and behind you are all American citizens who are only too happy to provide ID to protect our sacred right to vote in free and fair elections.
Tom Tradup is V.P./News & Talk at Dallas-based Salem Radio Network. He can be reached at ttradup@srnradio.com.