Senate RINOs Squandering Golden Opportunity

While Senate Majority Leader John Thune and his RINO chums plead powerlessness to move an election integrity bill the vast majority of Americans support, a group of House Republicans is — in the words of President Donald Trump — going for the gold. 

“The MEGA Act is the most comprehensive package of election reforms in a generation,” Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., chairman of the House Administration Committee, said at a roundtable discussion last month.

The chairman of the committee that oversees federal elections unveiled the election integrity bill in late January. Provisions include:

› Requiring states to verify citizenship of individuals when registering to vote.

› Implementing stronger routine voter list maintenance requirements in states. 

› Requiring photo identification to vote. 

› Implementing stronger routine voter list maintenance requirements in states.

› Requiring mail-in ballots to be received by the close of polls on election day. 

› Requiring states to use auditable paper ballots.

› Banning ballot harvesting. 

› Banning ranked-choice voting.

› Banning universal vote by mail. 

Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, said the SAVE America Act and the broader MEGA Act will “fix structural weaknesses in federal election law.”

Election law expert Hans von Spakovsky agreed. 

“This bill is needed to correct and fix longstanding problems in election administration, some caused by prior federal statutes that restrict the ability of state election officials to maintain accurate voter registration lists,” von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom, said following last month’s roundtable. 

“It will benefit all voters by helping ensure the security and integrity of their most precious right — the right to vote,” he added. 

The League of Women Voters hates it, so you know it’s got to be good. 

‘There Isn’t Anything I Can Do’

But the MEGA Act’s odds of landing on Trump’s desk are as long as the Siena Saints’ chances of winning the Men’s NCAA National Basketball championship. 

As of early Friday morning, Kalshi, a key player in the prediction markets, was giving the SAVE Act just an 11.4 percent chance of becoming law.

Thune insists Republicans don’t have the votes to pass the basic voter verification bill — requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot. That’s because the majority leader hasn’t given it a snow ball’s chance in hell. 

He very much wants you to know how brave he is for even moving the bill to the floor next week. A colleague said he received a fundraising text urging him to support Thune’s act of courage. 

But the Senate’s top Republican refuses to motivate his lazy RINO friends to put in the work to give passage a chance. Thune won’t budge on a talking filibuster, which offers a difficult but possible path to passage. Instead, he’s dooming the SAVE America Act to die under the weight of the 60-vote threshold to end debate on the bill.  

“We don’t have the votes either to proceed, get on a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one if we got on it,” Thune said earlier this week. “But that is just a function of math, and there isn’t anything I can do about that. I mean, I understand the president’s got a passion to see this issue addressed, as we all do.” 

No, they all don’t. Thune’s got at least one “Republican” on record saying she won’t support it at all (minds can be changed, of course with sticks and carrots, like Democrats do), a few more that want to avoid a vote like the plague, and others who fail to see the value or are just too indolent to back the talking filibuster end-around. 

‘100 Percent on Leader Thune’

In a lame move to placate his many conservative critics, Thune is reportedly eyeing a prolonged debate that would at least force Democrats to defend why they oppose legislation that is supported by more than 70 percent of American voters. In fact, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll finds 71 percent of respondents support the SAVE America Act, including 69 percent of independents. The poll also found 81 percent support voter ID, including 79 percent independents and 70 percent Democrats. And 75 percent of those surveyed back proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in U.S. elections. 

So why can’t they get their representatives in D.C. to support the critical election reforms? Because Democrat politicians recoil from election integrity like the undead from light. And some Republicans care much more about enriching themselves than saving the republic. The voters in their states should evict them from their cushy congressional seats as soon as the next applicable election. 

“This is really 100 percent on Leader Thune. I know for a fact the American people have told their senators what they want, both Democrats and Republicans,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R- Fla., told Fox Business earlier this week. 

Thune is the Majority Leader. He is “clothed with immense power,” as President Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said when demanding congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Lincoln, of course, was a leader emerging from the smoke, blood, and rot of a merciless civil war. Thune is an establishment man who doesn’t seem all that concerned about the “will of the people.” He’s more interested in the comforts of Congress. But he’s finding out that it might just be more work to pretend to be doing work than actually doing it. 

‘We Have an Opportunity’

Meanwhile, Republicans in a razor-thin House majority keep leading on election integrity. Somebody has to. Americans have lost a lot of faith in their elections. 

A poll last month by the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections found just 60 percent of respondents said they are confident votes will be counted accurately nationwide in the 2026 midterms, a 17 percentage point drop since just after the 2024 presidential election. 

The SAVE America Act would go a long way to restore confidence. The MEGA Act would be even better. Dare to dream.

“We absolutely need the two key provisions in the SAVE America Act — we do need citizenship verification and photo ID. But I think we have to go a long way beyond that,” Steil told me on a recent edition of the Dan O’Donnell Show in Milwaukee. 

“I think we have an opportunity here with President Trump in the White House, who is acutely attuned to the exact challenges we face in elections and the need to reform them, that this is our moment in time to substantively fix U.S. elections so that Americans once again have full confidence in the results we see as tallied on election night,” the Wisconsin Republican added. 

The opportunity is quickly slipping away. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.