Tillis goes scorched-earth on SAVE America Act, threatening to stall it

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Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.), a retiring Republican who has become one of the most vocal critics of the Trump administration in his party, delivered harsh words for President Trump’s top-priority voter ID legislation on the Senate floor Thursday morning, saying he would stall it if the legislation came again to the Senate.

“If I see a reconciliation bill come from the House with another failed attempt to confuse this election, I will use every device I have available to slow down the wheels of government until people cop a clue and do the math,” Tillis said, nearly shouting, on the Senate floor.

Tillis has suggested before that he’ll block efforts to pass that bill if given the chance. But his speech Wednesday comes as the House debates a party-line package that includes some provisions of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, an election security bill that Trump wants Congress to pass before anything else. Versions of the bill have already failed to pass the Senate multiple times.

Tillis, clearly incensed, argued it would be impossible to put the provisions of the bill into practice even if Congress did manage to enact it, with so little time before the November elections.

Using a whiteboard and referring to his experience implementing a voter ID law in his home state, Tillis described the breadth of agencies across the country that administer elections, which would have to rush to implement any new voter ID legislation, and how long it would take Congress to finalize the bill before it could be put in place in states.

“I have been trying to explain for nearly a year that the SAVE Act, whether it’s the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that’s being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are, all of them are fundamentally flawed and impossible to implement by this election,” Tillis said.

Tillis voiced support for some kind of grant program to states that would encourage them to implement voter ID rules and penalize them with audits if they don’t. But using reconciliation, already a difficult exercise, is not the way.

He said it would only serve to cast doubt on the integrity of the election results while also tying up Congress’s precious few remaining legislative days to get things done before the elections.

“Let’s stop the charade. Let’s stop the distraction,” he said. “Let’s get the government funded, let’s use reconciliation if we need to, but let’s not clog it up with another piece of policy airdropped by a member of this Senate or the White House that will undermine this bill, undermine what we need to get done before the election.”

Updated at 1:09 p.m. EDT

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