Mike Lee

Throughout 2026, Donald Trump has been waging a battle with Republican Senate leaders over their legislative priorities. Senate Majority Leader John Thune wants to signal to midterms voters that the GOP cares about affordability, though Trump’s policies have in many ways exacerbated cost-of-living concerns. The president, on the other hand, has made no bones about his conviction that Congress should put aside absolutely everything on its plate in order to enact the SAVE America Act, a piece of signature MAGA legislation wrapped in Trump-dictated poison pills.

The SAVE America Act began life as the answer to a made-up question: What can the federal government do to end the massive epidemic of noncitizen voting? (To be clear, there is absolutely no evidence of this “problem.”) The version the House passed in February imposes elaborate proof-of-citizenship requirements for anyone who wants to register or reregister to vote. These are requirements that millions of American citizens would not be able to meet, particularly if implemented in the middle of an election year as Trump is demanding. That alone would be enough for every single Democrat in Congress to oppose the measure until the very last ditch, notwithstanding MAGA efforts to pretend it has massive public support by conflating it with a simple voter-ID requirement.

Apparently Trump was not satisfied with the House bill’s divisiveness, so he created what he calls a “final version” of the SAVE America Act. It added on a ban on no-excuse voting by mail (currently allowed in 36 states, including 19 carried by Trump in 2024) and totally non-germane violations of transgender rights. This is the package he’s demanded Senate Republicans somehow pass — and that the House pass too (since it has never voted on the “final version.”) Informed by Thune that there is no way this hyper-partisan bill could get anything like the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Democratic filibuster, Trump has demanded that Republicans kill the filibuster. This is a total nonstarter, even among some intensely MAGA senators who know there will someday be a Democratic president and Senate majority. He’s also urged Thune and company to nestle the SAVE America Act into a party-line budget reconciliation bill that Democrats can’t filibuster. Told there’s no way the Senate parliamentarian would go along with that, Trump’s said she should be fired. That’s not happening either, but even if it did, no parliamentarian is ever going to rule that the SAVE America Act is budget germane because it’s clearly not.

So you have a Senate majority operating on the basis of facts, logic, law, and arithmetic and a president just childishly demanding what he wants. Is there a way out for Republicans?

Well, Mike Lee thinks so. If there is anyone more invested than Trump himself in the myth of massive noncitizen voting and more obdurate that the SAVE America Act is the answer, it’s the senior senator from Utah. For months, he has been arguing that Republicans should force Democrats to engage in a “talking filibuster” — which means actually holding the floor with nonstop debate — against the SAVE America Act. In fact, Lee hasn’t just been arguing: He’s been encouraging MAGA activists to make his preferred strategy a litmus test for Republican senators, which has exposed them to a torrent of abrasive calls, texts, and social-media posts. Even back in March, Politico reported Lee’s colleagues were fed up with this:

[I]nside the Senate, the Utahn’s scorched-earth, hyper-online methods are sparking a wave of mostly private animosity from GOP colleagues who believe his plan to push through legislation overhauling how federal elections are conducted is ill-conceived and potentially harmful to the party’s chances in the midterms …

Lee, however, shows no hint of self-doubt in news conferences and floor speeches — and, more importantly, late-night X streams and a constant stream of social-media posts — that the SAVE America Act is anything less than a make-or-break moment for American democracy.

“It would be a suicidal move for us as Senate Republicans, for Republicans in general, if we don’t put everything we’ve got into this,” Lee said at a news conference this week. ”We need to debate this as long as it takes to get it done.”

Now that Trump has returned to his earlier demands that the Senate stop all legislative activity until the SAVE America Act becomes law, Lee is at it again, The Hill reports:

“The truth is, we haven’t tried what I believe it takes to get the SAVE America Act passed, which is to put it on the floor and to say we’re going to debate this for weeks,” Lee said. “And we’ll stay through weekends. We’ll stay through previously scheduled recesses if necessary, but we’re going to stay on this bill until it passes.”

It’s unclear if either Trump or Lee actually believes their conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting or are just cynically using the issue to rev up the MAGA base. Worse yet, it’s possible all this hot air is designed to create a pretext for meddling with midterm voting or denying the results if they are adverse. But if Trump and Lee have their way, we won’t have any sort of national debate heading toward the midterms about war and peace or inflation and growth or how to deal with AI or any of the other issues we should probably be discussing. We’ll have a long, hot summer of one side fanning election-denial conspiracy theories and the other side calling it all nativist lunacy or a distraction from Trump’s poor record. The spectacle sure won’t improve the tone of civic discourse.