Less than 24 hours after Senate Majority Leader John Thune kicked off his attempt to satisfy those demanding passage of a voter identification bill, House Republicans were already saying they weren't fooled. “What’s happening right now in the Senate is a SHOW VOTE,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., a leader of the House push to pass the bill, posted Wednesday. The Senate is “doing this to try and get around having to invoke the standing filibuster but I won’t let them fool you. These two things are not the same!” she wrote later in the day. A growing number of House Republicans are vowing to kill any bills coming from the Senate until the chamber passes what’s known as the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID at the polls. They want Thune, R-S.D., to try to get the bill to Trump’s desk via a simple majority by forcing a “talking filibuster,” which could hold up the Senate floor for months. The debate the Senate began on Tuesday is procedurally not the same thing, and Thune is expected to eventually seek to end debate by moving to invoke cloture, which requires 60 votes. That would require buy-in from some Democrats, given the chamber's 53-47 partisan split. President Donald Trump has “called on the Senate to use the talking filibuster to secure passage of the SAVE America Act immediately, superseding everything else. We agree,” 25 House Republicans wrote in a Wednesday letter to Thune. “Consider this our filibuster.” The president has said he will not sign any bills, excluding a measure to reopen the Department of Homeland Security, until the SAVE America Act reaches his desk. It’s not yet clear whether Thune’s debate scheme will ease Trump’s threat. Thune and many in the Senate Republican Conference have said the votes do not exist to maintain a talking filibuster or torpedo the legislative filibuster. Currently, the voter ID legislation does not even have the support of every GOP senator, on top of no Democratic support. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., who has urged the Senate to get rid of the filibuster, said he doesn’t think the extended debate playing out in the Senate will ease calls from the House. “I mean, this is not a show. It’s the U.S. Senate,” he said. “We can’t even pass a bill that truly 80 percent of America agrees on … I’m tired of it, man.” Van Drew was among 40 Republicans who voted against an otherwise bipartisan Senate bill Tuesday, making good on promises to vote down legislation from across the Capitol. The bill still passed 345-41, but it’s a bad omen for other Senate bills that don’t have the backing of Democrats. “Sounds to me like they are already passing Senate bills over there,” Thune said Tuesday when asked about House Republicans’ threats. Luna and a few others have also threatened to vote down a must-pass spy powers reauthorization bill and any compromise proposal on housing over the SAVE America Act. Thune stressed “there just aren’t the votes” to nuke the legislative filibuster. “What I promised from the very beginning is we’ll get it up and we will have a vote. I can’t guarantee the result,” he said of the voter ID bill. “At some point we’ll have the votes and we’ll have to see where people land,” he added. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who supports changing the filibuster rules, said he doesn’t agree with his House colleagues “drawing red lines and saying ‘you won’t do this’ when we don’t know what the future holds.” “For example, if we get a deal on [Department of Homeland Security] funding, they’re not going to vote for that?” he asked. The DHS shutdown has surpassed the one-month mark. “I think they would, so they just shouldn’t be making those kinds of blanket statements.” A Senate GOP aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, “If certain House Republicans want to filibuster Senate bills because of the realities of Senate procedure, that’s their prerogative, but I don’t think that’s remotely close to a winning message to take to voters in the midterms.” The decision to vote down Senate bills will only get more challenging if the two chambers strike a deal on a major housing measure, which Thune said will be in front of them “pretty soon.” The measure is key to the party’s affordability messaging ahead of November. “They’ll have to make a decision on that, but I’d hope they would be able to pick that up and pass it and send it to the president,” Thune said. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who has been leading the charge on the SAVE America Act among his conference, said “it is very talking-filibuster-like, what we are doing.” “Regardless of what nomenclature you want to use, what word you want to assign to what we're doing, I see this as a form of talking filibuster,” he said Wednesday. “We’re getting on a bill. We’re debating that bill. We’re doing so without any plan to immediately file cloture on the bill and hope to keep this up for some time. I hope many weeks, if necessary, in order to close that gap,” Lee said. But Thune eventually filing “cloture on the bill would be, I think, a profound mistake,” he said. Still, House Republicans hold the extended debate scheme means little if there’s no guaranteed outcome. “I want the SAVE America Act on President Trump’s desk — how they get it there is in their hands right now,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La. “I hope they do whatever they have to do.”
