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How Speaker Mike Johnson Will Save the SAVE America Act

Townhall (Tom Tradup, column) · back to the audit
How Speaker Mike Johnson Will Save the SAVE America Act

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.

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."

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.

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.