Congress

The GOP’s dirty little secret about the SAVE America Act

Published

4 weeks ago

July 2, 2026

House conservatives bristled this week over the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE America Act — the GOP elections bill that President Donald Trump has called his “No. 1 priority” in Congress — and shut down the floor in protest.

Their outrage has obscured an inconvenient truth for the Republicans locking arms with the president to push for the bill: It can’t even pass the House — at least not the version Trump is pushing.

Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded this year.

Instead, Johnson and other House leaders have stuck with an older version of the SAVE America Act that focuses on proof-of-citizenship requirements but otherwise lets states run their elections as they see fit.

“I’m going to do everything I can with the vote tallies that we have,” he said when asked by a Blue Light News reporter if a Trump-style approach to mail voting could come to the floor.

“We all do” want to follow Trump’s lead on the issue, Johnson added. “But the mail-in ballot, he’s acknowledged, is a very difficult thing to regulate at the federal level, because different states do it differently.”

When a band of conservative hard-liners pushed over the past week to add the election bill to the annual Pentagon policy bill, Johnson moved to attach the version of the bill that narrowly passed the House in February, not a broader version that includes the additional provisions Trump has demanded. The latest version Trump wants has never passed the House — which is part of the problem.

The added provisions Trump wants include a blanket prohibition on transgender people playing women’s sports, a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors and the mail voting crackdown — which could effectively end the no-excuse policies both blue and red states employ to send ballots out widely.

Trump has said he would allow exceptions for military members, the disabled and other small groups but he has shown no sign he is willing to abandon the push entirely — saying just this week that the mail voting restrictions must be included. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office this week the “no mail ballots” provision was “maybe the most important of all, because it’s so corrupt.” He added he was willing to allow “strong exceptions” for military members and other limited cases.

But the lack of widespread GOP support for upending the voting systems in states like Arizona, Florida and Alaska is an open secret on Capitol Hill, where many Republicans credit mailed ballots with helping them win tight races.

“Listen, absentee ballots are not a bad thing historically as long as you put some kind of structure on it,” Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nevada) said in an interview. “Just have some commonsensical safeguards for when it has to be postmarked by.”

The Supreme Court last week struck down Trump’s attempts to regulate mail voting by executive order — by restricting the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward.

Amodei said he was “happy” to hear of the ruling: “It says mail-in voting in and of itself is not evil. … There ought to be some mechanism for you to do that”

Rep. Julie Fedorchak (R-N.D.) is an outspoken supporter of the SAVE America Act and has introduced a bill that could allow Republicans to incorporate portions of the elections overhaul in a party-line budget reconciliation bill. But she said a near-total ban on mail-in voting would pose problems for states like hers, where some counties have a single polling place.

“We’re a rural state,” she said. “I understand the concerns about mail-in voting … but I think the solution that I’m in favor of is restricting it and creating these commonsense reforms for it.”

Johnson acknowledged those concerns in his comments Tuesday, saying residents of rural states such as Alaska sometimes find it “very difficult to get to a ballot box, and so they use mail-in ballots very effectively, and I think securely, and that’s something that has to be contended with.”

“There are other states that do it well, and without a problem,” Johnson said. “Our concerns are with the handful, five or six blue states, who abuse this, and California is the avatar for this, because it is so ridiculous.”

In the Senate, where even the narrower House-passed version of the bill has languished due to GOP divisions and a Democratic filibuster, there is also an understanding that the expanded bill Trump wants is DOA.

During a lunch with Trump last week, Sen. Rick Scott told colleagues that while the expanded version of the election bill — including the mail-in ballot provisions — were good policies, there wasn’t consensus for them within the Senate GOP, according to a copy of the Florida Republican’s notes reviewed by Blue Light News.

Instead, Scott pointed to other tactics as a more realistic way forward, such as attempting to launch an extended debate on the slimmed-down bill that does not include Trump’s latest demands.

Calen Razor, Jordain Carney and Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.

Congress

Scalise will kick off August campaign sprint in marquee Nebraska House race

Published

7 hours ago

July 31, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is zeroing in on one of House Republicans’ biggest contests — a purple district in Nebraska — when he starts his recess campaign sprint.

Scalise will travel to Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District in the Omaha area for an event with Republican Brinker Harding in the coming days, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter granted anonymity to share plans not yet made public. Republicans are digging in to defend the seat, which Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential race and is among Democrats’ best pick up opportunities this fall as they seek to flip the House.

Harding is running against Democratic consultant Denise Powell to replace retiring GOP Rep. Don Bacon. Bacon, a moderate-leaning Republican, flipped the Omaha district red in 2016.

After Nebraska, Scalise is planning to travel across the country throughout August, including to defend GOP incumbents Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ and Zach Nunn’s key battleground seats in Iowa’s 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts and Derrick Van Orden in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District.

He’ll boost candidates working to flip blue districts like Laurie Buckhout in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, Derek Merrin in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District and Mike LiPetri in New York’s 3rd Congressional District.

Scalise also plans to travel to Michigan, Colorado, South Carolina and Texas for campaign events over the August recess.

Congress

Trump needles Cornyn as Blanche remains blocked

Published

11 hours ago

July 31, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump goaded John Cornyn on social media Friday morning, accusing the Texas senator of withholding his vote on Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination in retaliation for Trump’s central role in his political demise.

Cornyn, who lost his May primary to Texas’ scandal-ridden attorney general, the Trump-endorsed Ken Paxton, has threatened to block Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee until the White House promises to permanently shelve its $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” in writing — something Trump appears unwilling to do.

“John Cornyn never had a problem with the so called “Fund,” which will not benefit me, but rather the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas, who easily won the Nomination for the United States Senate,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Several Republicans bristled at the fund, which could have been deployed to compensate Americans who faced charges after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and which gives the president and his family audit immunity over taxes. At his July confirmation hearing, Blanche said that the fund, part of a settlement the president reached with the IRS, was defunct. But the administration has been “reluctant to change” the text of the settlement, Cornyn told reporters Thursday.

Trump signaled his continued support for the Jan 6 rioters on Friday.

“I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined!” he wrote. “Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide Presidential win, where this was a major subject of debate, and so did John Cornyn, until he lost his Election to an opponent that I Endorsed.”

On Thursday, the president suggested that he could punt a Senate vote on Blanche until after Cornyn — and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) — leaves the chamber at the end of the year. Cornyn, however, suggested on social media that there are other Republican senators with concerns about the fund.

“After the midterms, who knows who’s going to be the next United States senator from North Carolina or Texas?” Cornyn told reporters.

Congress

Capitol agenda: The Senate’s fly-out agenda takes shape

Published

12 hours ago

July 31, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Senate Republicans are prepping a jam-packed — if somewhat optimistic — agenda for their final week before summer recess.

Majority Leader John Thune wants to move stopgap funding through Dec. 11, bipartisan Russia sanctions legislation and a bloc of nominees — perhaps including attorney general pick Todd Blanche.

He’s also under pressure from President Donald Trump, administration officials and many of his GOP colleagues to adopt a budget resolution — the first step in unlocking another party-line spending bill.

Leaders are prioritizing the stopgap, though. Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) expects continuing resolution text to be unveiled later today, she told reporters Thursday, and an initial vote is expected Monday evening.

Still TBD: Collins wants to use the funding patch to block the Trump administration from putting political appointees in charge of approving grants — a demand Democratic senators are also making.

The decision is in Thune’s hands. He acknowledged a “handful of issues” are still under consideration with the CR, and said he’s “hoping both sides can come together and figure” them out.

As for the sanctions bill, leaders of both parties are still trying to work out a deal to fast-track the legislation amid concerns from some Democrats and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that it gives Trump too much tariff power.

In addition to the nominees package, Thune also hasn’t ruled out an initial vote on the landmark cryptocurrency bill both parties have spent months negotiating or teeing up a bipartisan college sports overhaul now in final stages of talks.

But the big question is whether Republicans can take a major step toward another reconciliation bill by advancing a budget resolution.

Thune met Thursday with Budget Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who said he was “optimistic in terms of how things are kind of coming together.”

Republicans anticipate giving a number of Senate committees instructions for the bill, setting up a lengthy and politically painful process ahead of adoption despite pushes for urgency from the White House.

Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was the latest official to head to Capitol Hill to try and light a fire under top Republicans. But GOP senators don’t necessarily see the urgency.

“The hard part is the president wants to be able to move fast, like an executive can move, and we’re a legislative branch,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). “It doesn’t move that fast.”

What else we’re watching:

— BLANCHE TEETERING: Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general isn’t dead yet. But it’s certainly on life support. The acting AG met with Cornyn and Tillis Thursday at NRSC headquarters, and one person familiar with the discussion said the group was “working collaboratively now.” But it would now be difficult to confirm him before August recess under Senate rules.

— FARM BILL TEXT: Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman said his farm bill legislative text — originally expected Thursday — could come Friday or Saturday. The bill, which is expected to include language allowing year-round E15 sales and a potential compromise on postponing GOP-led cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is set to be marked up Thursday.

Jordain Carney and Grace Yarrow contributed to this report.