It was a beautiful, warm Sunday in Washington, D.C., and Sen. Lisa Murkowski was leaving the Capitol to go “pot some plants.”

The Alaska Republican, along with her Senate colleagues, were in town that day for a rare weekend session to continue extended debate on the GOP’s voter ID bill pushed by President Donald Trump.

What was often lacking was the debate itself.

Missing through more than a week of debate were the all-nighter speeches, marathon orations, and back-to-back lawmakers demanding floor time that some had hoped to see. 

Murkowski was far from the only senator not hanging around the floor last Sunday. When asked a question, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said he “had to run to the airport.” And another group of Republicans arrived at the Capitol from a golf match.

Even as leaders now turn to deploying the arduous budgetary maneuver known as reconciliation to try to pass portions of the bill, senators still plan to resume floor attention on what they call the SAVE America Act when they come back from recess in mid-April.

This wasn’t exactly the 24/7 full-court press that influencers on the right had called for. They wanted to see Senate Majority Leader John Thune force a so-called talking filibuster to skirt a 60-vote threshold on the bill, which aims to make Americans show a photo ID at the polls and prove citizenship when registering to vote.

A gambit like that would have risked handing control to Democrats and would have been impossible to sustain, Thune has said. Instead, the extended debate that began on March 17 is meant to appease the loudest voices and show that Senate Republicans are taking it seriously, even if final passage is unlikely.

Unlike current filibuster practice, a talking filibuster would require a constant presence; the majority has to keep most of its members near the floor, ready to act at a moment’s notice. And there were times during last weekend’s extended debate where Republicans did not have a quorum.

“I don’t know that many people are watching the debate,” Murkowski said, though she saw one advantage to working on a weekend: The Senate was able to quickly move on Markwayne Mullin’s DHS nomination, confirming him just days after his hearing.

Murkowski, like fellow Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, has her reservations about the elections bill and some of the provisions swirling around it, particularly the bans on mail-in voting that Trump has been pushing for. 

Tillis was blunt. He said Sunday the debate on the floor had not been effective: “It’s lived up to my expectations for a nonoutcome.” 

Following up on Thursday, Tillis had the same assessment, saying the week was “probably not as productive as we could have made it.”

Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., pushed back on the idea that the debate was slowing down other work in the Senate. “We’ve been doing other things as well. We’ve been running nominations through, and we’re continuing trying to find a path forward on the Department of Homeland Security funding.”

“So long as we’re doing that and we’re continuing making the point that Americans should be voting in U.S. elections,” it was time well spent, he said.

During the rare weekend session, most of the attention was, in fact, on the behind-the-scenes conversations amid leadership about how to reopen DHS amid the partial shutdown.  

That led to a week of negotiating to fund the department, and the Senate broke a logjam in the wee hours of Friday morning, agreeing to a plan that would fund all of the department with the exception of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and most of Customs and Border Protection.

“I do think if it is buying us time to resolve the impasse with Homeland, that’s OK. It keeps everybody here,” Murkowski had said earlier this week. But she’d described some of the amendment votes on the election bill itself, like one banning transgender athletes from playing in women’s sports that was blocked over the weekend, as “messaging initiatives” from her party.

Reconciliation rush

With no Democrats on board, the SAVE America Act has no current path to passage on the floor. And despite Trump pressuring Thune to “TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER” again this week on social media, Thune has continued to resist. He says the votes do not exist.

Others agree. “It’s not within Senator Thune’s control. It’s within the control of members, and he simply doesn’t have the votes,” Tillis said. 

But the measure could get a new life, as leaders resurrect the idea of another budget reconciliation bill with some election provisions included. That effort inched forward this week as the Budget committee chairs met to review plans to draft a budget resolution, the first step in the process. Conversations on a reconciliation will happen in tandem with the debate when the Senate returns. 

Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., posted on X, “I assure you we will proceed quickly and efficiently to a second reconciliation package.”   

“This bill will focus on ensuring ICE and other vital functions of homeland security, as well as the U.S. military and efforts to increase voter integrity, are Democrat-resistance proof,” Graham wrote. Thune has suggested Republicans are likely to seek funding for ICE and CBP through such a reconciliation bill.

But Sen. Mike Lee, the man pushing the hardest in the Senate on the measure, has said “reconciliation won’t work here.”

The Utah Republican, also a member of the Budget Committee, echoed a concern shared by other conservatives that the bill will become too scrubbed of its provisions by the Senate’s “Byrd bath” in the reconciliation process. Measures would need to have a budgetary impact that cannot be “merely incidental” to the larger purpose of the measure.

“An offer to use budget reconciliation to pass the Save America Act might look like a blessing. It’s really a curse,” Lee wrote. 

“Don’t fall for — or feed — the distraction,” he added Friday.