Trump Says No Other Bills Signed Until SAVE Act Passed

So the Hill had an article that says Donald Trump has announced that he will not sign any more bills brought to his desk until the SAVE Act is voted up by the Congress. SAVE stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility America Act. So SAVE, S-A-V-E, Safeguard American Voter Eligibility. Basically what this is, is a national voter ID requirement. It requires voters to provide documentation, proof of citizenship. And they registered to vote and a photo ID at the time of voting. It has passed the House three times already, but it cannot move forward in the Senate due to the 60 vote threshold. And obviously the Democrats are not going to go along with this. And thus it is stalled in the Senate. Trump put out on the Truth Social Media, "I as president will not sign other bills until this is passed." In all caps, "Not the watered down version, go for the gold, must show voter ID and proof of citizenship. No mail in ballots except for military illness disability." Now what Trump wants the Senate to do is go back to the talking filibuster. Now for those of you who don't know, I'm sure most of you do, you are the most educated people in all of Indiana politics and government. It used to be the filibuster, the stall for lack of a better term, was what they called a talking filibuster, where you had to stay up there on a stage to prevent legislation from passing. You could read the phone book, you could read your love letters to your wife, you could recite the alphabet forward and backwards in whatever language you wanted, but you had to stay on up in front of the Senate and you had to keep talking. There was famous stories like guys going to the bathroom and stuff, all of these things. You could not leave the stage in order to keep the filibuster going. At some point, and this is really because senators view themselves, look, all 100 people in the Senate view themselves as being president of the United States someday, or they think they deserve to be president of the United States someday. And so they basically said years ago, well, this is kind of an inconvenience for us. We're too important to do this. We'll change the rules and we'll make it easier to do a filibuster. You don't have to stand up there and talk. And so what you have to do is you have to get a majority of the senators to vote to move forward with the debate. So they have to get the majority of senators. You're never going to get that. The 60 senators, you have to get to move forward. You're never going to get that, especially in a divided Congress. So in order to actually have the debate on the bill to get to the vote on the bill, you have to get the super majority, the 60 plus of the senators to vote for something in order to get it there. Not going to happen. So what Trump wants the Senate have to do, John Thune, the leader in the Senate is to go back to the talking filibuster. Say, look, if you want to stop something, you're going to have to earn it. And then eventually, unless you all are just willing to, I mean, eventually it could take months, but eventually they would run out of Democrats that could spend days on the Senate floor stalling something. And then we'll get a vote on this. The Senate, the Republicans have thus far rejected Trump's demands that this happen. And they have done this, really demanded this in the first term is demanding the second term. They have they have rejected thus far. There are a couple areas where you don't have to have the 60 vote threshold. Judges are one of them. That was actually started by the Democrats, not the Republicans. And Trump is very upset about this. We have seen guys like Ken Paxton, who is running for Senate in Texas, say, I will I will step out of the race running for Senate in Texas on the Republican side if the Republicans are willing to get rid of the filibuster and pass the SAVE Act. John Thune has said that's not happening. Part of when he ran to be Senate leader. One of the things he vowed to the more moderate members of his caucus was I'm not getting rid of the filibuster. And he stayed true to that. So let's talk about strategy on this, because ultimately this really does affect us here in Indiana. And just like it affects people across the country, it would change the way we vote in America. And while I agree with what Trump is trying to do, and it seems pretty common sense that you would have to prove you're a citizen of this country in order to vote and you'd have to show an ID in order to vote, I think we can learn some things from DOGE and apply them to this instance here. So let's go back to DOGE. Remember when Trump gets elected, he's putting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of DOGE and they're going to be the reformers and they're going to slash the government. And at the time, I'd said, well, that's great. But history teaches us. When it comes to the American public, no matter what the issue is, incrementalism is you usually far more effective and building momentum than just coming in with the machete. And nobody wants government spending cut more than me. Nobody's a bigger advocate for getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse in the government than me. But I also understand the American public is not as quick to change or does not accept change or radical differences in policy or government like me or you would. And so I said, I think DOGE was making a mistake at the time, taking a machete to this thing and coming up with all of these big things so fast rather than taking the biggest tippy top stuff, showing that to the American people and then showing what happens with the money that you're saving. And that would build momentum. You know who did a great job of this in Indiana? It was Mitch Daniels. That was the approach Mitch Daniels took. It was one successful government reform at a time. Now look, Mitch Daniels did a lot of things I don't agree with. See Lucas Oil Stadium. But in terms of reforms of government and taking Indiana to a better place than it was before he got there, I don't think many people can dispute Mitch Daniels, especially early on did a good job. What did he do? He found the big things first. He would publicize those big things and show them the most wasteful, unaccountable acts of government and he really took them one at a time. One of the most famous ones is he believed there were too many state vehicles. He took pennies and had his employees, his staff, put pennies on these tires and sometimes a month later they would come back and the penny was still on the tire. That penny being on the tire showed the vehicle had not been used. And so he was able to go to the people of Indiana and go look at this. We have all of these state vehicles that we can prove to you are not being used. We need to get rid of these. We need to sell them off. And the people of Indiana said he's right. Look at this. Great job government. And so Mitch Daniels was able to build momentum. He was able to build up to bigger things, some of the more controversial stuff. And by the time he got to that, people said, well, I'm a little on the fence about this, but this guy's got a good track record, some proven results. He clearly shows he's kind of going to bat for us. Okay, we'll buy into it and go along with it. And that is why when Mitch Daniels ran for reelection in 2008, a year in which Republicans got clobbered all over the country, Barack Obama won Indiana, Mitch Daniels cruised to reelection because people in the middle saw him as a reasonable person who if he was getting rid of government, it was government that was wasteful and they bought into it. And a lot of middle people and even some Democrats were willing to cross over and vote for Mitch Daniels because of his proven track record. DOGE, on the other hand, went for all of these things out of the gate and they didn't do a good job of explaining why they were doing it. And they didn't do a good job of explaining where the money was going after it was quote unquote saved. And then it came out, a lot of that money wasn't really saved. It simply got reverted back to the government agencies to spend in another fashion. There was very little actual savings that happened because of DOGE and the people caught on to this. And so you're seeing all of these big things happening very quick, these big quote unquote cuts, they weren't really cuts. But then that gives the media the opportunity to pick it apart because you're not selling it. All of these things they're doing, they weren't explaining why they were wasteful. You have to hold the American public's hand and you have to be able to build momentum. Not the way I want it done, but it's the reality of the game. And so when we come back to to bring all this back to the SAVE Act, well, I agree that you should have to be a citizen of this country and you should have to show an ID in order to vote. I think the Republicans are getting nothing because they're trying to get too much. I think if you look back to the 2020 election, there were two reasons that there is great mistrust with what happened with 2020. Number one was the mail in voting. When you live in a state, and we saw this here in Indiana, we saw it in all the states. When you live in a state where they're simply mailing ballots out to people without really any check and balance on who got the ballot, who filled out the ballot, and who mailed the ballot back, that is going to cause distrust. I think when you focus on how do we provide safeguards, which is part of this bill, around mail in voting, ensuring that the person who requests the ballot is the person that fills it out, and you explain that to the American people, I think they'd be okay with that. I think we should all have a vested interest in ensuring, however someone votes, that the person who is alleged, who cast the vote, who is alleged to cast the vote is the person who filled out the ballot, that that vote is actually yours, whether you're a Democrat, Republican, whatever. I think you would get great sympathy on that. I think you would get understanding and public support on that. I think the other thing that Republicans should be focusing on is voter ID. We have voter ID in Indiana, and every year there's never a question about the results. Have you ever heard of somebody going, "I," and I get some people are going to say anything, but have you ever heard in the mainstream or some thing backed up with evidence in an Indiana election over the past 10, 15 years, "Oh, I think there was a bunch of voter fraud that took place in Indiana." Certainly not with any proof. Now there have been some people who have been caught illegally voting. It's a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of 1% of our population. It's going to happen anywhere, but voter ID is a great way to stop that. I think Indiana is a pretty fair and good electoral process that works very well. Indiana could be a model for the rest of the country, and I do think amongst the majority of people, they would be sympathetic to a national, just a national voter ID. I think the mail-in balloting and I think the voter ID are easy things to get people to get their heads around. Where you start losing people and it gets turned into a culture war, and I'm not saying that I agree with this, but I'm saying if you just look at the data on this, is when you start going into the citizenship thing. Number one, it is perceived by a lot of the public as targeting, targeting people of a certain ethnicity or makeup and like that. It is also seen as burdensome to many people and it gives the media, also it gives the media the opportunity. That's the biggest part of this. It gives the media the opportunity to set the narrative and it gets painted as being targeted. It gets being targeted as whatever is they want to call people. It gets targeted as being burdensome. I think the Republicans would have a much better chance to get the SAVE Act passed if they would focus on ID requirement and mail-in balloting. I think the citizenship aspect of it is a poison pill. I think you would solve most of the problems anyway with the ID requirement and reining in some of the mail-in balloting that is allowed. I don't think this bill is going to pass because I think just like with DOGE, when you try to do too much, too fast, it causes the American people to recoil, especially if the media is feeding them a narrative. It'll be fascinating to see though if Trump stands firm on refusing to sign any more bills until the SAVE Act is passed.