President Trump’s biggest priorities ‒ approving more Pentagon cash and setting aside money for voting restrictions ‒ couldn’t get closer to the finish line overnight.
WASHINGTON ‒ The Senate just went out with a bang ‒ passing a government funding bill to try to avert another shutdown, confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general and bucking a voter ID measure.
Overnight, a quick flurry of legislative activity doubled as an escape plan to push senators into their annual five-week break and onto the campaign trail.
But after days of Republican infighting, the chamber left a lot on the cutting room floor.
A plan to advance an influx of Pentagon cash amid the Iran war was stalled, as was bipartisan legislation to overhaul college athletics. Hopes of getting around to years-in-the-making legislation to regulate cryptocurrency were dashed. A circuitous effort to implement pieces of President Donald Trump’s biggest legislative priority ‒ a voting restrictions bill called the SAVE America Act ‒ didn’t get closer to the finish line, either.
A few days ago, Senate Majority Leader John Thune acknowledged the challenges he was having getting everyone on the same page.
“It’s just a series of things that are sort of piled up,” the South Dakota Republican said. “Train wreck’s’ probably a little extreme of an analogy.”
The result: Congress will be using what vanishingly little time it has left before the November midterms fighting some of its most politically fraught battles. With the fall elections potentially expected to end the current era of full GOP control on Capitol Hill, Senate Republicans are still struggling to reconcile their need to stay in power with their need to get things done.
“I’m planning on being in all battleground states, and I’m anxious to get there to help my colleagues,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana, said in a floor speech this week. “But we’ve got to stay here and get our business done.”
Voter ID bill eases SAVE fervor — for now
The last few weeks and months in the Senate have been dominated by a conservative furor to pass some version of the SAVE America Act. The bill ‒ which would significantly curb mail-in voting while requiring photo ID and documentary proof of citizenship to cast a ballot ‒ is at the top of the White House’s legislative wish list.
While the full bill has virtually no chance of passing, Republican leaders in Congress are working in tandem on a creative end-run around the Senate filibuster to approve it anyway: incentivizing states, through grants, to turn parts of it into law. That gambit is in the form of a budget bill, which can pass along party lines without Democrats.
While the blueprint is primarily focused on defense spending to beef up the Pentagon, it would also set aside billions of dollars for election-related purposes.
“The most you’d spend is $20 billion on election integrity,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said of the plan.
The House of Representatives already greenlit the effort weeks ago, the first step in a long process. Senate Republicans had hoped to do the same before skipping town, but 11th-hour disagreements and other priorities got in the way. Instead, hoping to quell frustration among the biggest SAVE proponents, Sen. Jon Husted offered a measure in the middle of the night to require photo ID in elections. The Ohio Republican’s bill failed.
“Not a single Democrat joined us,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said. Lee is arguably the SAVE Act’s biggest champion in the Senate. Before the Senate left, he repeatedly threatened to obstruct the schedule and keep his colleagues in session if they didn’t move SAVE forward.
“I left no stone unturned,” he said on social media. “I wish the outcome would’ve been different as to the adjournment and as to these votes.”
Lee, or any other Republican senator, could’ve objected to the chamber adjourning just before 5 a.m. None of them did.
Zachary Schermele is the congressional correspondent for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.