Mike Johnson said this week the House does not have the votes to move forward with the Trump-backed Save America Act version that would crack down on mailed ballots. Donald Trump is still pushing for a harder line, but the House leadership is not there yet.
Johnson told a POLITICO reporter, “I'm going to do everything I can with the vote tallies that we have,” after being asked whether a Trump-style approach to mail voting could reach the floor. He also said, “But the mail-in ballot, he's acknowledged, is a very difficult thing to regulate at the federal level, because different states do it differently.”
Trump’s Mail-Ballot Push
Trump called the Save America Act his “No. 1 priority” in Congress and said this week that the “no mail ballots” provision was “maybe the most important of all, because it’s so corrupt.” He said he would allow “strong exceptions” for military members and other limited cases.
The version Trump wants has never passed the House. Johnson and other House leaders have stayed with an older version of the Save America Act that focuses on proof-of-citizenship requirements while otherwise letting states run their elections as they see fit. That narrower approach leaves out the broader mail-voting crackdown Trump is demanding.
Mark Amodei on Absentee Ballots
Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada took a different line. “Listen, absentee ballots are not a bad thing historically as long as you put some kind of structure on it,” he said, adding, “Just have some commonsensical safeguards for when it has to be postmarked by.”
After the Supreme Court last week struck down Trump’s attempts to regulate mail voting by executive order, Amodei said he was “happy” to hear of the ruling. “It says mail-in voting in and of itself is not evil. … There ought to be some mechanism for you to do that,” he said.
House Republicans Split
House conservatives bristled this week over the Senate’s refusal to pass the Save America Act, and the lack of support for upending voting systems in Arizona, Florida and Alaska has been an open secret on Capitol Hill. Rep. Julie Fedorchak, an outspoken supporter of the bill, has introduced a measure that could let Republicans fold parts of the elections overhaul into a party-line budget reconciliation bill.
That leaves Johnson with a narrow path and Trump with a demand that the House cannot yet meet. The older version can still move on proof of citizenship, but the broader mail-ballot crackdown is stalled unless House leaders find a new route through Capitol Hill.
