Long in the works but timely enough, this is National Zero’s guide to the SAVE Act – sorry, SAVE AMERICA Act, as a certain fat drama queen recently insisted as to raise the stakes:
It’s been in the works since early last year, but both chambers of the Florida state legislature have passed HB 991, known colloquially as the Florida SAVE Act which requires new voters, or current ones who change their address or party affiliation, to prove citizenship by presenting a passport, birth certificate, or the equivalent upon registration – excepting those with a REAL ID, as in a driver’s license/DMV-issued non-license ID as those would have already only been issued to citizens.
Yup, they’ve sent it over to heels-wearing Governor Ron DeSantis and he’ll sign it any day now, a bill that has been in the works for nearly a year just getting some last minute adjustments earlier this month because – you’re going to love this – they had to amend it to push back the effective date for the citizenship verification requirements to January 1, 2027. “This gives adequate time in order for that population who does not yet have a Real ID to come into compliance, or to in some other way prove their citizenship,” said Republican state Senator Erin Grall, one of the bill’s sponsors.
For those keeping score at home this would mean that the GOP’s laboratory of autocracy, the land of ethnic Cuban far-right sociopaths, bath salts, Scientology, the home of the hallowed cathedral of all corruption and degeneracy in the United States, Mar-a-Lago – is holding back until after the midterms on what’s already a pretty graduated, rolling process in which those who renew their driver’s license in December and remain at the same address will not have been officially verified as eligible citizen voters until December 2034. Simply because imposing that requirement all at once now would be far too disruptive – and let’s be real here, if they knew with full confidence that it would advantage Republicans in November they would’ve made it effective immediately.
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) March 20, 2026
Which of course raises the burning question of why the national Republican Party is so hell bent on this stupid bullshit, and why the United States Senate right now is in session for this extended “debate” – that not even a lot of congressional beat reporters claim to understand exactly what’s going on in the chamber – this week into the weekend while the guy who says this is life or death for American elections heads down to that cathedral to collect tributes from his supplicants.
Probably get in a little golf too… First some recap on the all-but-dead effort to create a runaround to the Senate’s current debate session and get the SAVE Act passed with 51 votes:
EMPTY TALK AND FILIBLUSTER
This section’s a bit long and not totally necessary given the recent retreat from the maximalist position on filibuster reform… HOWEVER you may still want to check it out for a refresher on the topic and why it’s so important for the Senate GOP to leave intact.
EMPTY TALK AND FILIBLUSTER
"Fantastic Four" star Julia Garner says she was more focused on the job than those upset by her playing Silver Surfer:
"I said, 'I'm just going to still do my job.' Also, it's Shalla-Bal, so it's different."https://t.co/wcCMvrhAkb pic.twitter.com/Ni6rzQQOBc
— Variety (@Variety) July 12, 2025
Oh wait, shit. Wrong tweet. Was supposed to paste one in about an actress responding to the impotent rage being spewed by a bunch of foul-breathed virgins upset over her performance in a silly fantasy about their childhood heroes overcoming an imaginary existential threat.
Ah, here it is…
This is blatantly false. I have been working with @BasedMikeLee to find the votes and path forward to pass the SAVE America Act, which includes the talking filibuster. https://t.co/HZTbL6TysN
— Senator Katie Boyd Britt (@SenKatieBritt) March 7, 2026
Now by this point two weeks ago it should have been hammered into the thick skulls of said foul-breathed virgins that, no matter how much Katie Britt and John Cornyn and however many other handful of Republican Senators say they not only support the SAVE Act but the only actual means of getting it passed – which is by modifying the current auto-filibuster of 60 votes or nothing to what’s been called a “talking filibuster” – it is not happening. Simply because it would be suicide.
Hear it from the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel:
A talking filibuster will not prove a difficult lift for Democrats. Quite the opposite. It will give Minority Leader Chuck Schumer the whip hand over the Senate’s time and topics, and the power to extract enormous GOP concessions as a price of passing any bill…
Democrats can easily take turns eating, sleeping and flying home during this marathon. Only one of them needs to be on the floor giving a speech. The GOP, by contrast, will need to maintain almost all its members on the floor at all times. At any moment, Schumer might demand a quorum call – which demand 51 senators. Schumer could also move to adjourn, which would restart the legislative day – providing Democrats a whole new round of 94 speeches. Indeed, any new question or point sparks another round…
Let’s say the GOP lives through this speakathon, and get to the actual bill. Under today’s rules, Thune controls amendments. Under a talking-filibuster scenario, it’s an amendment free-for-all. Thune could pre-emptively attempt to “fill the amendment tree,” though that triggers… another round of Democratic speeches. Rinse, repeat. The only way to get to the endgame on the SAVE Act (the purpose of this exercise) would be to let Democrats have their amendments. And outside of a cloture environment, there is no requirement that amendments be “germane” to the SAVE Act. They also pass with just 51 votes.
Despite everyone in the Senate GOP knowing full well that was what was in the cards – in fact the Journal printed that nearly a month before Britt was still lying to the incels saying she supports a carveout to federalize American elections. And that absolutely deranged option is still the closest any Republican will get to even pretending to want to weaken the practice.
The get 60 yes votes or fuck you is the backstop to anything and everything that comprises their power. Last year Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall laid it out in response to Trump’s October rants against the filibuster during the prolonged government shutdown:
The filibuster provides an overwhelming structural advantage for Republicans, a big reason to be skeptical it will happen. Republicans want tax cuts and judicial nominations, neither of which the filibuster affects. To the extent Republicans want non-budget/tax legislation, it’s generally stuff like a national abortion ban that Republican leaders are happy for an excuse not to touch. They’re no more likely to pass something like that post-filibuster. The Democrats’ agenda is always legislation focused – actual laws that institute reforms, create services, safety nets, anything. It’s in the nature of being the party of government.
The senate filibuster is a permanent bar for any Democratic legislation Republicans oppose, regardless of which party is in the majority. Remember that Obamacare only passed in 2009-10 because two successive wave elections had briefly – for about six months – given Democrats the now unimaginable margin of 60 senate votes. Anyone who tells you the filibuster affects both parties equally is either lying or has been sleeping for the last 30 years… Because the filibuster is a permanent bar on any Democratic legislation, any reforms to protect the republic against Trumpism are all ruled out in advance. As long as the filibuster exists, it means any future Democratic presidency or trifecta is simply a replay of the Biden presidency, a short breather before the further advance of Trumpist autocracy.
Again, the moment of Senate Republicans pretending to entertain making changes to the filibuster has mostly faded. Still, all the above is important to internalize as a primer on the threshold overall for when – God willing – there’s another Dem trifecta and they’re moving abolish it to create lasting reforms that cure America of the deep sickness that is MAGA fascism.
NOW IT’S JUST A SMALLER COMPLETE WASTE OF EVERYONE’S TIME
On Wednesday Kim Strassel wrote that deranged Utah Senator Mike Lee – who would not shut the fuck up about this stupid legislation – and his minions “aren’t getting a full-on ‘talking filibuster.’ That plan was always pie-in-the-sky. More important, sources tell me, there simply weren’t enough GOP votes to proceed with the strategy; numerous senators opposed it. Thune has instead come up with an in-between approach: Republicans will be able to stage extensive arguments and amendments on behalf of the legislation, though the final product will still be subject to the 60-vote filibuster (and thus the minority will kill it). Lee seems to have accepted the hard math of the voting situation, and is casting the new approach as a win, describing it as a ‘hybrid version of the talking filibuster.'”
Which is probably how Trump was sold by Republican Senators on the idea that somehow Democrats are going to cross the aisle to vote for this stupid bill – as he told reporters in the above clip from Friday afternoon – but then again he also thinks he’s going to somehow shoehorn in anti-child “mutilizations” and banning trans girls from women’s sports, something we were told had already been achieved. Trump’s also vowed not to sign any other legislation until the SAVE Act hits his desk and also that if it doesn’t pass he’ll just find some secret way to sign an executive order imposing his will on American voters. A leader and his party changing their story every goddamned week does not lend itself well to summarizing the legislative or policy state of play. But here goes:
It really is like a stage production but just a really shitty one where all of the actors keep forgetting their lines, rewriting the script, don’t even really have a script so much as a vague outline of the beginning of the plot, few of them actually even want to be there, and the producer is a fat, orange megalomaniac who’s headed to Florida for the weekend instead of providing stage direction.
The toplines are sort of compelling when you ignore everything else…
VOTER ID, EGO, AND SUPEREGO
We don’t live in a democracy if our elected leaders fail to implement the will of the people https://t.co/hluxPitLw0
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 20, 2026
Could seriously put together a two hours supercut of clips from the last month of right wing media grifters both in and out of Congress screaming about the importance of requiring photo ID to vote nationally, trotting out that tired old bullshit about how you need ID to buy alcohol (though it does not seem that Trump has revived his fucking deranged bullshit story about needing it to buy cereal or a loaf bread), attend the DNC, to shop at Costco (it’s a fucking members only store), and so on.
A new one is “You need to show ID to shovel snow in New York City” which was true… If you wanted to get paid by the city to shovel snow off of public sidewalks, how the hell else is the city’s comptroller going to send you a paycheck for $19/hour of work – provided you’re over 17?
Also in the land of reality there’s this handy map from a think tank called MAP…
Yes, the stricter states correlate to redder ones and the looser states correlate to bluer ones but the way both Democrats and Republicans make it sound you would think that nobody’s ever won a goddamned election in a state whose voter ID laws are arrayed against the respective national party’s position on the issue… More simply Oklahoma sure as hell does not have a Dem governor, Senator, much less even a single US House member, nor does New Hampshire have a single Republican representing the state in either chamber of Congress and Gov Kelly Ayotte is a “RINO.”
Ketamine Brain and all the rest of those clowns are correct that it’s an 80/20 issue because the polling questions only capture the general sense that yeah, maybe you should be required to present a driver’s license or equivalent valid photo document at a precinct on election day. And if that were what the SAVE Act was requiring then – in a complete vacuum and an era of bipartisan comity – you’d probably be seeing roughly an 80/20 vote in the Senate. For the nth time, times were willing to concede it back in 2021-2022 in an attempt to put 60 votes together for a much larger election reform package. That ultimately failed because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were corrupt scumbags who were bribed out of a filibuster carveout – but not before Dems tried to meet the GOP in the middle. By turning down the offer Republicans made it clear that voter ID requirements are simply not existential for either side – in case the above map didn’t already spell that out for you.
Democrats in Congress also aren’t just going to give it away for nothing, Republicans don’t actually care enough to make any real compromise like allowing a national ban on partisan gerrymandering, 50-state automatic registration through every state DMV, standardized counting, and so on.
Stop laughing… Or at least laugh harder at the MAGA reich thinking that this goddamned Reichstag Fire of a bill as it stands is going to somehow get any Dem votes because it’s a bit much…
SAVE THE (MENTAL) CHILDREN
Well done Senator Lee.
Thank you for your courage and example to the other Republicans. pic.twitter.com/q93Ixr4G2U
— Kmcf4419 (@kmcf4419) March 21, 2026
Alex Jones is $1.2 billion in the hole, ruined for life and many lifetimes beyond because he simply could not, would not, and most importantly did not back down from his insistence that the Sandy Hook massacre was the crime of a deeply sick and twisted incel who acted alone and chose the most vulnerable target to leave his bloody mark on the 21st century. To Jones it had to be a false flag or a psy-op with the ultimate purpose of abrogating Americans’ Second Amendment rights. That obviously there was no reform afterwards shows that the system (of unremitting GOP opposition to gun safety legislation) works but that it was least attempted by Dems was all that was needed to confirm Jones’s priors: THEY would kill children to erode patriots’ defense against tyranny.
The 2020 election conspiracy shit is a false flag operation spurring the SAVE Act’s crackdown on the most sacred of civil liberties. It is the exact kind of paranoid MAGA mindset in reverse and fuck you if you would dare spitball the ratio of people currently incarcerated for violent gun crimes to those committing voter fraud is probably no joke 50,000 to 1. That it’s far more authoritarian and invasive of constitutionally-guaranteed rights than any red flag laws enforced at gun stores could ever be.
Some of the toplines:
🇺🇸 Anyone registering to vote for the first time or changing their address must provide documentary proof of citizenship in the form of a birth certificate or passport. It can only be done in person, not by mail or online, effectively creating the same “rolling basis” in Florida nationally – that will still sooner or later fuck over tens of millions of married women who adopted their husband’s surname and do not currently have a valid passport. If Florida starts shifting blue in 2028 then the Sunshine State GOP can find the nearest mirror to find who to blame. Then they’ll just reverse it.
🇺🇸 Any county clerk or other election registrar is liable for a federal felony if they fail to verify whether a registrant is a citizen even if that voter ultimately turns out to be a citizen. This as if there wasn’t already a shit ton of attrition in the profession after six fucking years of bamboo ballots and Italian satellites and Chinese thermostats and all that other shit, now they’re going to hang the pain of federal prison over their heads for day-to-day paperwork mistakes of civil service life.
🇺🇸 Every state’s voter rolls must handed over to the Department of Homeland Security. Just read that sentence again but add “Biden Administration Department of Homeland Security” and the MAGA reaction to that to picture how such a measure should be received. It has nothing but bad news written all over it and yet the Republican golden rule is upheld here: Do unto others what you’ve already projected them to be doing to you. At minimum they would just delete wide swathes of validly registered US citizen voters simply for having the wrong surname or living in the wrong town, leaving them with no recourse when it’s 6:30 PM on election day in a random precinct in Ohio.
It’s that last bit that does legitimately raise the question of why John Thune doesn’t just say “screw it,” do away with the filibuster, and pass the legislation. He’s 50/50 on waking up as Senate Minority Leader on January 4th, 2027, according to the latest Polymarket numbers. Lol if you think “integrity” is somehow what’s holding him back from letting the Trump Regime annihilate the Dem electorate.
Could be that he just thinks they’re fucking incompetent, that it won’t work, that Americans are too pissed to let it slide, he was there on January 6, 2021 and is worried it could happen again – and might be considerably worse and bloodier after a national election is actually stolen.
Not just fake stolen.
NO ONE’S COMING TO SAVE YOU
This Grant Stinchfield dickhead reiterated to his fanboys this week of their need to face the music. It’s simply not happening. There’s a slight chance that Dems will cave on a VERY basic national photo ID requirement just to get the Republicans to take it or leave it and shut the fuck up. There’s actually a strong argument for putting that in front of them even without any concessions on other related issues because it would undercut the next seven months of this bitching and moaning as the bill comes due – with the interest and penalties compounded – for all the failures and fuckups of this Trump 2.0 GOP trifecta – from Iran to ICE to gas prices to tariffs to corruption and everything else.
Because that’s what this is really about. You don’t need to be reminded but saying it out loud to simply reorient oneself to why “election integrity” is once again important as in September 2020 when Joe Biden led Trump by 12 percent in some national polls and mail-in ballots were all the rage.
This fat fucking baby already knew the SAVE Act wasn’t happening last month, he said it himself and thinks he’ll find some workaround – or just declare a “national election emergency” – actions that will hold up in court as sturdily as IKEA furniture compared to the solid oak of real legislation.
The New York Times actually summed it up better than Trump ever could have last month:
Though such falsehoods have been a focus of Mr Trump, he and other MAGA-aligned conservatives have made a particularly energetic push in the past month to urge Republicans in Congress to muscle through a strict new national voter identification bill ahead of the midterm elections.
As they face the potential for major losses in those contests, Republicans are bent on doing everything they can to enact the voting restrictions or, barring that, to spend the coming months hammering Democrats for opposing them, thus seeding doubt among voters about the outcome should Democrats prevail.
Emphasis added on the predictability and unoriginality of these fucking worms.