Let me say the quiet part out loud and put it on the record, knowing it costs something inside my own party. I want documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. So do most Americans. Gallup puts support for that idea at 83%. I don’t just believe election security matters. I believe that near-unanimity is the most valuable asset Republicans have on this issue, and I think we are about to throw it away.
The SAVE America Act would require states to verify citizenship against a federal database, share their voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security, and expose local election officials to criminal liability. Strip away the politics and look at the structure. It is one of the most expansive federal mandates on election administration my party has ever written. President Donald Trump is now willing to let Section 702 of FISA, a surveillance authority both parties call essential, lapse to force it through. He has also called to “terminate” the filibuster to the same end.
I know how raising this will be received. Bring up federalism here, and you get called weak, a RINO hunting for permission to lose. The Washington Examiner’s own writers have already noted that both parties rediscover states’ rights only when it suits them. Fair. But Republicans are the party of ideas.
“Just do it” was a Nike slogan, not a governing philosophy for rewriting the line between Washington and the states.
For half a century, we made one argument about elections: Washington does not get to dictate how states run them. We made it against the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. We cheered when the Supreme Court trimmed federal election oversight in Shelby County. Congress may have the authority to regulate federal contests, but authority is not wisdom, and every federal mandate we write becomes a precedent that does not stay ours.
How far are we willing to go to win?
In a May call with the progressive group Emerge, Former Vice President Kamala Harris floated expanding the Supreme Court, rethinking the Electoral College, and granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. Notice what every one of those moves requires: a Senate willing to break its own rules to get there.
The last time Democrats held power, the only thing that stopped them from doing exactly that was two of their own. In 2022, controlling the White House and both chambers, they tried to gut the filibuster to pass a federal takeover of election law. Then-Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refused, and it died on the floor. Even Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) thanked them, warning that the shoe might soon be on the other foot. Both senators are now gone.
The guardrail that saved us is no longer standing.
Some conservatives have a ready answer. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who spent years defending the filibuster, reversed himself to push the SAVE America Act through, reasoning that Democrats will scrap it the moment they hold the majority, so Republicans should not unilaterally disarm. I think that is backward. “They will break it anyway” is not a reason to break it yourself. It is the reason it breaks. Someone has to be the one who refused, and the party that claims to conserve institutions is the obvious candidate.
There is a turnout cost, too.
Tell our own voters that Washington will not take election security seriously, and some will stay home. That costs Democrats nothing right now. They just won Virginia and New Jersey by margins few predicted and took New York on the highest turnout since 1969. Their base is mobilized. Ours is the only one at risk of sitting down.
None of this means surrendering on election integrity. It means refusing to trade a permanent principle for a win we may not even get. That near-unanimous support was rare proof of national agreement, worth protecting, not burning as leverage.
So, here is my prediction, on the record. If Republicans break the filibuster to nationalize election law, we will not hold that power long. The pendulum swings, the way it always does, and the next Democratic majority will use the precedent we built to expand the court, add states, and rewrite the rules themselves. I would rather be wrong. I am putting it in writing so no one wonders whether anyone on the right saw it coming.
Thomas Jefferson saw where this ends. Writing in 1821, he warned that when all government “shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.”
Jefferson was describing a danger, not a strategy. My party still has time to tell the difference. If we don’t, hold me to this. And remember who said it before it was the popular thing to say.
Melik Abdul is a Washington, D.C.-based public affairs professional and Republican strategist.