House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on Wednesday that President Donald Trump has agreed to pass parts of the SAVE America Act via budget reconciliation, a major concession as the president pushes Congress to pass the election integrity measure wholesale.
Johnson told reporters that Trump had agreed to the piecemeal approach as the Save America Act has stalled in the Senate. The speaker said that the president agreed to delay signing a bipartisan housing bill until there was movement on the reconciliation process.
“I spoke with the president for 20 minutes before I went in and gave that rousing speech to the House Republicans this morning,” Johnson said. “He and I have talked about this a lot. He has expressed his priority and the preference of the SAVE America Act. We share that. We passed it three times in the House.”
The SAVE America Act would require voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and to show voter ID to cast a ballot. It passed the House last year, but has stalled in the Senate because of the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster threshold. Republicans currently have 53 seats in the chamber, but Senate Democrats oppose the measure, arguing it could remove millions of people from voter rolls.
Under the Senate’s reconciliation process, certain tax, spending, and debt limit bills can pass with a simple majority. Johnson suggested that the GOP would update the SAVE Act to give states grant incentives for applying its requirements, rather than imposing them across the board.
“We believe that if you create a grant program that ties it to reconciling the budget and you allow blue states, if they come to their senses, and they want to avail themselves of election integrity proposals and ideas and policies they can draw down from a federal fund and use those funds,” Johnson said.
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“We’re willing to invest heavily in that, and House Republicans will put together a reconciliation bill, Reconciliation 3.0, that will have that,” the speaker added.
The Senate parliamentarian would make the final decision over whether the updated bill would qualify as a reconciliation measure. Trump has previously called for the Senate to abolish the filibuster, which would allow Republicans to bypass the 60-vote threshold entirely.