Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., second from left, with, from left, Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., John Barasso, R-Wyo., and Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., speaks to members of the media on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 17, 2026. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
The world is on fire. Gas prices are rising. The US economy is in shambles. President Trump has bulldozed through his promise of “no new wars” and 6 in 10 Americans believe the country is worse off than it was a year ago.
But instead of addressing the issues that Americans actually care about, Senate Republicans are spending the next week or more attempting to further what has become the central organizing principle of Trump’s presidency: making it harder to vote.
On Tuesday afternoon the Senate began debating the Save America Act, which voting rights advocates describe as the worst voter suppression bill that Congress has seriously considered passing.
At its core, the bill is a solution in search of a problem, predicated on the lie that non-citizens are systematically voting in American elections.
“Americans are watching in horror as Donald Trump bumbles this country into war,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at a press conference on Tuesday. “He’s tanking our economy and driving up costs for families. But what are Republicans prioritizing in the Senate this week? They’re conspiring with Donald Trump to undermine democracy and disenfranchise millions of Americans.”
Trump calls the bill his “No. 1 priority” and claims it will “guarantee the midterms” for Republicans.
It won’t. The centerpiece of the bill is a “show your papers” requirement mandating proof of citizenship, such as a passport or a birth certificate, to register to vote. That could impact Republican-leaning constituencies more than Democrats. The ten states with the lowest levels of passport ownership all voted for Trump. Sixty-nine million women who took their partner’s last name and do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name could find it harder to register to vote under the bill. Republican women are twice as likely as Democrats to change their last name. And because voters would need provide this documentation in person at an election office, rural voters, who also lean Republican, could be forced to drive up to eight hours to register to vote.
“The SAVE America Act wouldn’t turn blue states red, and it can’t save Republicans from voter anger at unpopular policies,” the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote on Tuesday. In the MAGA era, the bill could even marginally hurt the GOP. Kamala Harris in 2024 won college graduates and voters earning over $100,000 a year. Mr. Trump carried those with no degrees and lower salaries. Which coalition is most likely not to have passports and birth certificates handy?”
On top of the proof of citizenship measure, Republicans added a photo ID requirement to vote, likely for messaging purposes, so that they can trot out the usual talking points about how you need ID to buy liquor, get on a plane, etc. That is intended to distract from how many Americans would be burdened by the bill’s core provisions.
For example, the bill’s requirement that voters provide citizenship documents in-person at an elections office would effectively end online registration, mail registration, and voter registration drives, methods that accounted for 1 in 3 registrations during the 2018–2022 election cycles. This requirement would apply not just to new registrants but every time someone updates their registration. Roughly 80 million people register or re-register every election cycle, and less than 6 percent registered at an election office. In addition to making it harder to register to vote, the bill would also require states to hand over their voter rolls, which includes sensitive personal information, to the Department of Homeland Security, which could lead to voters being wrongly purged based on faulty data.
When Kansas passed a proof-of-citizenship law in 2011, it blocked 1 in 7 people from registering to vote. If that happened on a national scale, 11 million Americans would be prevented from registering to vote every cycle. Suffice it to say there would be a national outcry if that happened, undercutting the alleged support for the legislation.
To appease Trump, Senate Republicans plan to go further, introducing amendments to outlaw mail-in voting, which even many Republicans oppose doing, and ban transgender women from participating in women’s sports, which just reinforces how the entire Senate debate is a political stunt.
At its core, the bill is a solution in search of a problem, predicated on the lie that non-citizens are systematically voting in American elections, which every major study has found to be an exceedingly small-to-nonexistent problem. At a news conference on Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) couldn’t cite a single example of fraud to support the legislation.
But that doesn’t mean we should simply dismiss the inevitable failure of the bill. The Republican Party’s repeated lies about the voting process have undermined the public’s confidence in elections. And the bill’s demise could embolden Trump to take more extreme actions to control elections, such as declaring a national emergency in an attempt to seize voting machines and ban mail voting, which right-wing election deniers are urging him to do.
