WASHINGTON — This past week, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson ran into stormier waters than usual and ended up sending the House home early Thursday, then visited President Donald Trump for help getting the legislative agenda back on track.
Johnson has a full slate of bills he needs to move relatively quickly, including funding for the military. But right-wing members of his caucus used procedural rules to block floor votes on any bill with close margins until the Senate takes up the , which the House passed three times already.
The SAVE Act would require proof of citizenship to register vote, picture IDs to cast ballots and a sweeping rollback of mail-in ballots.
“I don’t want to vote on anything else until this is passed and attached to the bills coming forward,” Rep. Ralph Norman, R-South Carolina, told reporters during a conservative House Freedom Caucus news conference Thursday.
Senate leaders say the votes aren’t there and senators should spend their remaining time focused on passing other bills before the Nov. 3 midterm elections that will decide which party controls Congress.
would address undocumented immigrants casting illegal votes.
Democrats, and some Republicans, say the problem of illegal immigrants voting . It’s already illegal to vote and, when it does happen, it’s usually because of a misunderstanding, they say.
Denise Migliore, an Australian who lives in Franklinton and voted in 2022 and 2024, of the law.
The h Secretary of State’s Office said a review of the state’s voter registration rolls found 403 noncitizens, 83 of whom have cast ballots in the past. Louisian has 2.9 million registered voters.
In the House, where Republicans hold 218 seats to the Democrats’ 212, Johnson needs near-total GOP buy-in to pass any legislation that Democrats oppose. Not easy.
Trump had refused to sign a bill reauthorizing agencies to spy on foreigners, which intelligence officials say is critical in fighting terrorism. He then canceled a Wednesday morning signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill that GOP candidates hoped to include in their campaigns to show they're working on affordability issues.
Getting senators on board with the SAVE Act was the reason for a closed-door meeting Wednesday with the 53 GOP senators. But it turned into a shouting match between Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, over the war in Iran.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-Madisonville, likened the tenseness of the meeting to “Euphoria,” HBO’s award-winning but hard-to-watch series about high schoolers dealing with addictions and toxic relationships.
Kennedy told Fox News Thursday that he’s unsure if any minds were changed about the SAVE Act at the meeting but noted that Trump was “pretty worked up about it.”
Both Kennedy and Cassidy support the SAVE America Act, but not enough Republican senators do to get it passed with a simple majority — 51 votes — let alone avoid a filibuster, which requires 60 votes.
Kennedy favors attaching the language to some other bill, such as an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, called FISA, which lapsed on June 12, or to a third budget reconciliation package, as Johnson has suggested. That procedure would end-run the need for 60 votes and allow passage with a 51-vote majority.
Reconciliation is time-consuming and complex. Just tacking on SAVE language to a reconciliation bill doesn’t qualify.
So, Johnson would attach the language as a sort of incentive package for states that voluntarily address the procedures outlined in SAVE.
“We believe that if you create a grant program that ties it to reconciling the budget, and you allow blue states, if they come to their senses and they want to avail themselves of election integrity proposals and ideas and policies, they can draw down from a federal fund and use those funds,” Johnson told reporters.
But not everyone is sold on that strategy.
"My message is to the speaker, and generally: Don’t think that we’re going to just add some token measures," said Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas.
Johnson ended up sending the House home Thursday afternoon — the Senate had left Wednesday — then heading to the White House Thursday afternoon to persuade Trump to back off a little bit.
Trump did, a little, asking hard-liners via social media to stop “grandstanding” by blocking votes on other bills, thereby giving control of the House agenda to the “Dumocrats.”
“We’ve got to be able to move forward on legislation,” Johnson told reporters after the visit. “This is the process in an era with small margins, but we’ll get the job done.”