The SAVE America Act, which President Trump envisions as legislation that can both crack down on illegal immigrants voting and transgender surgeries, is not the type of bill that appears designed to pass into law. Democrats detest it, Republicans have few realistic options to maneuver around them to advance it, and the two sides have engaged in no serious negotiations.
Mr. Trump himself acknowledges the bill’s dismal prospects.
“Because of the rules of the Senate, it’s very hard for them to get the number” of votes needed, he lamented on Thursday.
Yet Mr. Trump is insisting on a monthslong public fight over the bill, and the hodgepodge of provisions he is demanding be added to it, while threatening to hold up other business. “THERE IS NOTHING THAT IS MORE IMPORTANT FOR THE U.S.A.,” he wrote on social media last month.
But even if the bill offers the president little hope of changing policy, it does offer an appealing political calculus: At a time when voters are deeply concerned about high prices amid his war with Iran, the fight over the legislation allows him to try to shift focus to more favorable ground for Republicans.
At its core, the SAVE America Act, as passed by the House, would require voters to prove their citizenship in person upon registration, ban IDs without a photo at polling places and criminalize failures to enforce such requirements.
Although there is no evidence to suggest noncitizens vote in large numbers or U.S. elections are rife with fraud, requiring an ID to vote and mandating that someone prove citizenship before registering are broadly popular among the public.
It is also widely unpopular to allow transgender athletes to play in women’s or girls’ sports. The issue has little to do with voting, but Mr. Trump has demanded that it be combined into the bill, along with other measures like a ban on gender transition surgeries for youth. Senate Republicans have tried to carry out his wishes through a series of amendments, each of which has failed.
Mr. Trump is quick to rattle off how well his favorite issues poll.
Voter ID? “Eighty-six percent with both Republicans and Democrats,” he said Thursday. (Polling shows that the number is probably overstated, though most voters in both parties support it.)
He has long signaled his plan to use issues such as illegal immigration and transgender athletes to his electoral advantage as the midterm elections drew nearer.
Last year, Mr. Trump instructed Republicans to wait until right before this year’s elections to begin talking about transgender athletes in women’s sports.
“Don’t bring that subject up, because there’s no election right now,” he said that he told Republicans. “But about a week before the election, bring it up, because you can’t lose.”
Speaking on Wednesday to the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual fund-raising dinner, Mr. Trump ticked off his proposals for the bill that he believed were widely popular, and predicted that Democrats would accuse him of racism.
“It’s unbelievable. It’s not racism. It’s voter ID. It’s important for our country, and proof of citizenship is important for our country — very,” he said. “And men playing in women’s sports should not be allowed. That’s very important. And transgender for everybody, the mutilation of our children should not be allowed.”
Not every measure in the legislation or that Mr. Trump wants to add to it polls well. And Democrats have raised a number of objections, arguing that the legislation would make it harder to vote, and condemning it as an attempt at voter suppression. They have pointed out that fraudulent voting by noncitizens is already illegal and extremely rare, and there is no evidence to support Mr. Trump’s assertions that Democrats have tried to mobilize undocumented immigrants to sway elections in their favor.
As Senate Republicans called a vote on one of the bill’s provisions on Thursday, Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, accused them of political theater.
“Before I talk about the substance of the bill, let me make one other observation as to what is and what isn’t happening here,” Mr. Padilla said. “As prices are going up for families across the country — we talked about it so many times, health care costs, grocery bills, price at the pump — we’re not focusing or debating ideas on how to bring down costs for working families. Instead, we’ve now spent two weeks debating a bill that would make it harder for eligible Americans to register to vote, to stay registered to vote and to cast their ballot. How un-American.”
Mr. Trump has long alleged that any election he loses or fears losing must be rigged. He asserted that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas “stole” a Republican primary victory from him in Iowa in 2016 and predicted, before he defeated Hillary Clinton that year to win the presidency, that the general election would be “rigged.” In the months before the 2020 election, trailing in the polls, he again predicted that he would be cheated out of a victory, and, after losing to Joseph R. Biden Jr., claimed the election had been stolen through widespread fraud, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Before this year’s midterms, Mr. Trump has cast his push for the SAVE America Act as a matter of election integrity.
“This has always been a top priority for President Trump — he talked about election integrity frequently on the campaign trail and the American people sent him back to the White House to get it done,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman.
And as he worries that Democrats will take the House, Mr. Trump has once again raised the specter of a rigged election in his push for the bill.
“The only ones that fight it are the Democrat leaders, because they want to cheat,” he said on Thursday.
One cost of the fight over the bill has been the loss of precious Senate floor time to advance other priorities. But Mr. Trump has never cared much about how the legislative branch operates. During his second term, the president has repeatedly opted to take actions via executive order rather than involving Congress.
Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the Republican majority leader, has argued that it is worth contrasting Republicans’ and Democrats’ positions on the legislation, even if it has little chance of passage.
Mr. Thune has said Republicans want to put the Democrats “on record” and show “the lack of common sense that they apply to some of these basic issues where the American people agree with us.”
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
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