A few months before Election Day 2024, House Speaker Mike Johnson made a pilgrimage of sorts to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Donald Trump’s ring and unveil a proposal they seemed excited about.
The Republican duo pitched legislation that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. (The absurdity of watching two notorious election deniers pretend to be deeply concerned with the integrity of elections was a detail the public was apparently supposed to overlook.) Soon after, the proposal took legislative form, and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (or SAVE Act) was born.
In time, however, this solution in search of a problem metastasized. Instead of just making it harder for Americans to register to vote, Trump and his allies expanded the original version of the SAVE Act by adding provisions that also made it harder to cast votes and renaming the package the “Save America Act.”
In recent weeks, the president announced that this still wasn’t good enough. In addition to making it harder to register to vote and requiring an ID to cast ballots, Trump decided the package also had to impose harsh new restrictions on mail-in voting, as well as new restrictions on transgender athletes and gender-affirming care for minors.
He still hasn’t explained what punishing transgender Americans has to do with voting rights, but the president has begun condemning earlier iterations of the legislation as “the watered-down version,” which he expects Congress to disregard.
The far-right package doesn’t have any realistic chance of success in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to advance, though Trump apparently has a new plan in mind. After spending part of the weekend insisting that there’s a great public clamor in support of a proposal that most Americans have never heard of, the president pitched a weird new ultimatum. NPR reported:
President Trump threatened to withhold his signature on all bills until Congress passes stricter federal voting requirements — a move that escalates his efforts to change election rules ahead of the 2026 midterms.
In a social media post Sunday, Trump said he won’t sign any bills into law until Congress passes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act. ‘I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed,’ Trump wrote.
If the president follows through on his threat, then he’ll refuse to sign into law every piece of legislation that clears the Republican-led Congress indefinitely, until his anti-voting, anti-trans package reaches his desk.
Time will tell whether Trump does intend to follow through on this threat, but if the goal is to intimidate Democratic opponents of the far-right package, the president probably ought to lower his expectations.
“The SAVE Act is Jim Crow 2.0,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in an online statement responding to Trump’s ultimatum. “It would disenfranchise tens of millions of people. If Trump is saying he won’t sign any bills until the SAVE Act is passed, then so be it: There will be total gridlock in the Senate.”
The New York Democrat concluded, “Senate Democrats will not help pass the SAVE Act under any circumstances.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
