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House Republicans prepare full-court press for voting restrictions

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The House is set to vote next week on a once-obscure elections bill that has now become a household name among hard-right activists and a major rallying point for an otherwise divided GOP.

The SAVE America Act, aimed at tightening voter registration standards, has a difficult path to enactment despite a no-holds-barred pressure campaign from the likes of President Donald Trump and tech mogul Elon Musk. Democrats are certain to filibuster the bill in the Senate, and it’s unlikely the GOP is ready to take extraordinary steps to overcome that hurdle.

But amid growing fears that their party is not doing enough to address Americans’ key concerns — rising prices chief among them — House GOP leaders and key senators have chosen to put the election security push at the center of their agenda.

The issue almost tanked a massive government funding package this week and threatened to extend a four-day partial government shutdown — until Trump intervened and ordered House Republicans to pass the bill without attaching the elections legislation.

But the issue is not going away. Besides the House action next week — the chamber’s second vote on a version of the legislation in less than a year — there is a mounting campaign on GOP senators to find ways around Democratic opposition and get the bill to Trump’s desk.

Trump is personally involved in the effort. Majority Leader Steve Scalise spoke with the president about the bill at a Jan. 29 White House meeting, and GOP Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin met with Trump to discuss it Thursday afternoon.

Scalise said in an interview that Trump “wants to find the best place to get it passed so it can get signed into law” and Republican leaders are “in the process of working with the president to get the best path forward.”

The legislation would trigger major changes to how Americans vote, including requiring would-be voters to present proof of citizenship to register, eliminating mail-only registrations, and requiring photo ID in every state for the first time. It would also require states to take new steps to remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls.

The push for the bill has taken flight among GOP hard-liners, who won a private promise from Speaker Mike Johnson to schedule the upcoming vote, according to four people granted anonymity to describe the conversations, in lieu of attaching the election bill to the larger spending package and threatening its ability to clear the Senate.

White House deputy chief of staff James Blair this week also wrangled House GOP holdouts upset over the lack of action on the elections bill. The top Trump political aide worked to salvage the funding package in a series of phone calls in the final minutes before it was ultimately passed, according to three people with direct knowledge of the conversations.

Democrats and voting-access advocates have attacked the legislation as likely to disenfranchise huge swaths of legitimate voters in a misguided effort to address an alleged epidemic of noncitizen voting that they say does not exist.“If you’re one of the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who does not have access to your birth certificate, or if you’re one of the 50 percent of Americans who don’t have a passport, the SAVE Act could make it impossible for you to participate in elections,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this week.

But the bill is in keeping with Trump’s longstanding belief, unsupported by evidence, that elections in many states are “rigged” in favor of Democrats and that strong federal action is needed to rectify it. He said in an interview this week that Republicans should seek to “nationalize” elections.

Addressing House Republicans at a policy retreat last month, Trump told them they “ought to pass” the SAVE America Act, formerly known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

“Our elections are crooked as hell, and you can win — not only win elections over that and not only win future elections, but you’ll win every debate because the public is really angry about it,” he said.

He reiterated the message in a Truth Social post Thursday, published after his meeting with the three senators: “We are either going to fix [America’s elections], or we won’t have a Country any longer.”

The House is expected to vote on a procedural measure Tuesday paving the final floor action later in the week. What happens in the Senate after that is less clear.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has pledged to call the bill up for a vote at some point in the coming months, but under normal circumstances Democrats could block it from proceeding.

Yet rank-and-file House Republicans and some GOP senators are pushing for a breakthrough, urging Thune to require a “talking filibuster” or “standing filibuster” that would eventually, they believe, force Democrats to relent. The change would force senators to be present and speaking on the Senate floor to block legislation, as opposed to the current practice of requiring 60 votes to end debate and move to the final passage of most bills.

But Thune has treaded carefully around any suggestion that the 60-vote rule should be diluted. Many Republican senators want to see the supermajority threshold start in place, and Thune dismissed claims from some House Republicans this week that he had agreed to pursue the talking filibuster route. He said he would only agree to discuss the matter with his conference.

With the Senate still working through how to pass long-term Department of Homeland Security funding, that internal conversation has yet to take place. Some senators are privately and publicly warning the push could tie up the Senate floor for weeks or months, blocking other GOP priorities.

Some hard-line Republicans are floating a trial run, using the talking filibuster to try to pass a DHS funding stopgap, according to three people granted anonymity to describe the private discussions.

“I would just remind people that the coin of the realm in the Senate is floor time, and we have a lot of things we have to do,” Thune told reporters. “Triggering a talking filibuster has implications and ramifications that I think everybody needs to be aware of. So we will have those discussions.”

In a sign that Republicans are looking at this as more than a political messaging exercise, the bill’s proponents say they are addressing some of the criticisms of the bill — including that it could effectively bar members of the U.S. military stationed abroad from voting.

Co-author Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said there are exceptions in the bill that would address the military and other concerns but allow only “true absentee ballots.” He said he was otherwise focused on pushing the other chamber to sidestep Democrats and send the bill to Trump.

“They get on the Senate floor, they can call the question, if there are people willing to speak … there’ll be drama, and then we’ll see what happens,” Roy said. “We’ll see who wins, but that’s what we’re supposed to do.”

Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

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Congress

House Oversight chair: Bill Clinton punts question to committee on whether Trump should testify in Epstein probe

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Former President Bill Clinton told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it’s “for you to decide” whether to call up the current president, Donald Trump, to testify in the panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation, chair James Comer told reporters Friday.

“[He] went on to say that, ‘President Trump has never said anything to me to make me think he was involved and he met with Epstein,’” Comer, a Kentucky Republican, recalled Bill Clinton telling the committee during his deposition.

“I know there’s a lot of curiosity about President Trump,” Comer continued. “I thought that was an interesting thing that President Clinton said.”

But Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in a subsequent news conference during a break in the deposition proceedings that Comer’s remarks were not an “accurate description” of Bill Clinton’s testimony.

Garcia declined to share more details, accusing Republicans of breaking the rules with their disclosures about what was being discussed inside the room. But he reiterated that Trump should be subpoenaed in the panel’s Epstein probe.

Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) said that he now, in fact, had “new questions” about Trump’s alleged falling out with Epstein. Trump has said the two men fell out years before Epstein’s 2019 arrest and that he had no part in Epstein’s criminal activities. Trump also has not been charged with any crimes.

Bill Clinton has maintained he was an acquaintance of Epstein’s but stopped communicating with him at least a decade before the late financier’s arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during her testimony before the committee Thursday, denied ever meeting Epstein and said she had no knowledge of his or Maxwell’s crimes.

Neither of the Clintons have been accused of wrongdoing.

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FEMA taps billions for disasters, warning Democrats of ‘dire’ shutdown impact

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The Trump administration spent more than half of the balance in the nation’s disaster relief fund this week, pointing to that dwindling aid as means to pressure Democrats into yielding in DHS funding negotiations.

A FEMA spokesperson said Friday that the agency sent out more than $5 billion this week for recovery projects, including for disasters “that happened more than 15 years ago.” The withdrawal substantially shrinks cash in the disaster coffer that held $9.6 billion as of last week and appears to contradict Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s weekend announcement that FEMA “is scaling back to bare-minimum, life-saving operations only.”

Accusing Democrats of “playing political games” with disaster aid amid the DHS shutdown, the FEMA spokesperson warned of “dire consequences” as the disaster relief fund “is being rapidly depleted.”

It has been almost two weeks since DHS funding lapsed, and still top lawmakers and the White House are trading offers on policies to curtail the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, which Democrats are demanding as a condition of voting to fully restore agency operations.

Republicans delivered a private counteroffer late Thursday, 10 days after Democrats on Capitol Hill sent their last proposal. A White House official granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door negotiations also cited diminished disaster relief Friday, challenging Democrats to “make a move … before more Americans are harmed.”

Some Democrats on Capitol Hill have offered plans to fund FEMA and other non-immigration agencies at DHS amid the negotiations over immigration enforcement policy. But top Republicans have rejected that idea.

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Bill Clinton says in opening statement he had ‘no idea’ about Epstein’s crimes

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Bill Clinton plans to testify that he did nothing wrong and had “no idea” about the crimes Jeffrey Epstein was committing — nor did he see anything that “ever gave me pause” — according to his prepared opening statement to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing — I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals,” the former president said in his statement, which he posted on X.

The prepared remarks also lambasted the Republican-led committee for demanding testimony from his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who spent over six hours answering questions Thursday during her own deposition.

She testified that she does not recall meeting Epstein and denied any knowledge of his sex trafficking offenses with longtime co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Whether you subpoenaed 10 people or 10,000, including her was simply not right,” he said in the statement.

In contrast to Hillary Clinton’s opening statement, which referenced Epstein and Maxwell’s “criminal activities,” Bill Clinton’s statement makes no mention of Maxwell.

The former president said he is in Chappaqua testifying in compliance with a congressional subpoena because “no person is above the law, even Presidents — especially Presidents.”

He continued, “I hope that by being here today, we can bring ourselves a little further away from the brink and back to being a country where we can disagree with one another civilly–where the search for truth and justice outweighs the partisan urge to score points and create spectacle.”

Bill Clinton has maintained he was an acquaintance of Epstein’s but stopped communicating with him at least a decade before the late financier’s arrest in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. Neither he nor Hillary Clinton has been accused of wrongdoing.

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