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Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) warned his Republican colleagues on Monday that it would be a “self-defeating” strategy to hold up legislative action in the House over their demands surrounding the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act and other measures.
“To my colleagues, whomever is thinking that stopping the work of House Republicans to make Americans safer right now and to bring down the cost of living — impeding that progress just because stubborn Senate Democrats won’t do the job of the American people is self-defeating. It doesn’t make any sense,” Johnson told reporters.
His comments come the week after Republican hard-liners in the House blocked unrelated legislation from coming to the House floor as they called on the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship for voter registration and voter ID to cast a ballot.
This week, Republican fury about the voting bill threatens to hold up action on the annual defense authorization bill.
Arriving in the Capitol on Monday afternoon, Johnson said he had been at the White House for “the last couple of hours talking about the strategy of moving forward very important legislation.”
President Trump last week canceled a scheduled housing bill signing because of his fury at the Senate over the voting bill. Later, though, after a meeting with Johnson, Trump in a Truth Social post urged House Republican rebels to stop “grandstanding,” “unify,” and stop voting down procedural “rules” that held up action on the House floor.
Johnson referenced his plan to include aspects of the SAVE America Act in a budget reconciliation bill later this year, which would bypass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold and Democratic opposition without upending the tradition of the filibuster, as Trump and some Republicans have called for.
“Remember we passed it three times in the House, and we intend to pass it again,” Johnson said of the voting rule. “But the only way to get that to the president’s desk, we’ve been shown many times, is to put it on a reconciliation bill. So, that is in process. We have a plan to do that, to tie it to reconcile the budget, which should clearly pass the Byrd Rule, the Byrd test over there.”
The Byrd Rule stipulates that anything included in a reconciliation bill must relate to a budgetary matter to keep the legislation focused on fiscal issues.
But that rule is why Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), a main proponent of holding up House action over the SAVE America Act, is not satisfied by Johnson’s pitch of including some SAVE America Act provisions in a reconciliation bill.
“This cannot be done. It is impossible. It will not pass the Byrd bath. I have amendments that should be made in order,” Luna said on the social platform X in response to Johnson’s comments.
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