Washington — A group of conservative House Republicans is continuing to stall much of the chamber’s floor activity as they press for stronger action on President Trump’s voting regulations measure, the SAVE America Act.
The latest showdown came Tuesday, when the holdouts derailed Speaker Mike Johnson’s effort to pair the SAVE America Act with the annual defense policy package, the National Defense Authorization Act, and send the combined measure to the Senate.
The rebellion blocked a party-line procedural vote that would have cleared the way for final votes on the defense bill and other legislation. Fourteen Republicans opposed advancing the measure, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who changed his vote for procedural reasons so GOP leaders could bring the proposal back up later.
Johnson told reporters he remained confident the impasse could be resolved. “We’ll work on that over the next day and a half, and we’ll get everybody to a yes,” he said. “It makes no sense for us to stop our very important progress forward from House Republicans because some Senate Democrats are refusing to do their job.”
Before the vote, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, one of the Republicans pushing the effort, said she wanted the House to adopt an amendment placing the voting regulations directly into the text of the defense policy bill. She dismissed Johnson’s approach as “a procedural head fake,” contending that it would leave the election-related language more vulnerable to being removed in the Senate.
“What my amendment would do is it would put it into the text of the bill, then they would have to file the amendment specifically to strip voter ID plus proof of citizenship,” Luna told reporters.
Even so, Luna conceded that the provisions could still be taken out of the must-pass NDAA later in the legislative process, particularly once the bill moves to conference negotiations.
“If they choose to do that,” she said, “mine makes it harder for them to strip it out.”
GOP Rep. Tom Burchett, another holdout, said the onus isn’t just on the Senate, where the SAVE America Act does not have the support to reach the 60-vote threshold to advance in the upper chamber, or even simple majority support.
“Until we’ve exhausted every avenue, it’s still our issue,” Burchett said.
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The latest standoff between Republican hardliners and leadership began last week after Mr. Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for a landmark housing affordability bill. The president sought to use that legislation as political leverage in his push to get Congress to adopt controversial voting requirements, such as showing proof of citizenship and restrictions on mail-in ballots.
Hardliners then said they would block other legislation from advancing until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act, forcing House GOP leaders to cancel Friday votes.
But after Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, met with Mr. Trump at the White House for several hours, the president called on holdouts to end their blockade.
“No more grandstanding, please!” he wrote.
Ibrahim Aksoy
contributed to this report.
