Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has lost patience with President Donald Trump’s strong-arm tactics to pass a bill that can’t be passed.
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The president has grown increasingly obsessed in recent months with passing the SAVE America Act, a package of new voting restrictions so draconian that even the vast majority of state driver’s licenses wouldn’t be eligible as voter ID without also providing a birth certificate. Senate Republicans do not have the votes either to overcome a Democratic filibuster, or to change Senate rules to make passage easier.
Thune has been very blunt that the votes aren’t there. But on Wednesday, Trump insisted he didn’t know what he was talking about, saying Thune did in fact have the votes and just wasn’t letting it get to a vote.
In response to reporters telling him Thune said there was no path to passage, he simply said, “That’s too bad for him and too bad for the Republican Party.”
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Later in the afternoon, Thune lashed out at Trump’s flippant denials of reality.
“That must be a different form of math,” said Thune in response to Trump’s claim that the votes were there to pass the bill.
Trump’s other allies are beginning to come to grips with the fact that the legislation won’t happen. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently signed into law his own state-level version of the SAVE America Act, posted to X, “I think the chance the Senate actually passes a real SAVE Act before the August break is basically zero. Happy to be wrong about this, but I don’t think I am.”
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