The Outrageous House Republican Move to Enact Trump’s Vote Suppression Proposals By the Backdoor of Budget Reconciliation 43%
By Charles Tiefer0%
7/20/2026, 4:52:40 PM
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House Republicans will bring forward this week a surprising and dangerous form of the voting restriction proposals that President Trump has been relentlessly pressuring Congress to pass for months.
That act may well discourage or exclude millions of voters via draconian requirements for presenting proof-of-citizenship when registering, showing rigorous voter ID at the polls, or even purging voter rolls.
Previously, Trump has pushed these notorious proposals under the guise of “election integrity,” termed the “SAVE America Act,” repeatedly and loudly, and they have even passed the House.
But the proposals have failed in the Senate, for lack of the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster, thanks to unyielding Democratic resistance and an assist from some Senate Republicans.
Trump has asked Senate Republican leadership to abolish the filibuster in order to get the legislation through, and even to fire the universally-respected Senate Parliamentarian, and has been repeatedly refused.
It seemed dead.
His threat is back, disguised in a new form.
Now, House Republicans have deceptively rebranded the voting initiative, seeking to get elements of it passed as part of a “reconciliation” bill.
Such bills need only 51 Senate votes, but they are restricted to fiscal measures.
Trump has pushed through two of these already, the “big, beautiful” tax cut bill of a year ago, and the three-year ICE funding bill this past June.
So, the alarming issue discussed here is whether House Republicans have found a backdoor path to pass something so damaging to democracy, which was dead and buried under the filibuster.
The SAVE Act policies are blatantly anti-democratic.
To begin with, the bill would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Over 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens lack easy access to the requisite documents.
Over 60 million American women have changed their name after marriage and do not have a birth certificate with the required match to their current legal name.
It is Trump’s way, by invoking the myth of election fraud, to disenfranchise millions of voters.
So, what makes passage suddenly a dangerous prospect?
The SAVE Act has nothing to do with budget procedure.
But now, House Republicans have said, in general terms, they would be spending $10 billion on these legislative proposals.
It is the $10 billion which grounds the claim to fit within the requirements for reconciliation treatment.
But reconciliation rules would not just allow giving out the lump sum of money with a condition that states must obey the SAVE Act.
That kind of condition would be “incidental” to the spending, not part of the spending.
In the past, the Senate has rejected tacking on things like minimum wage increases or immigration reform to reconciliation bills.
So, in the past, it was not feared that an attempt to move the SAVE Act using reconciliation could happen.
Hence, House Republicans must be contemplating ways they could pass much of the measure by dint of valid budget reconciliation language, namely, passing the test that it should have a “primary, direct, and substantial fiscal impact.”
Here is a quick overview of the entire process.
First, the bare-bones budget resolution, which the House Budget Committee reported on July 16, has to pass the House, and will in August be expected by its supporters to be put before the Senate, needing only 51 votes.
Passage of the budget resolution is only the first of two stages.
In the second stage, a reconciliation bill, implementing the budget resolution in legislative language, would pass (its proponents hope) the House and Senate, again needing only 51 votes in the Senate.
The new budget bill may fail for unrelated reasons, of course.
It is part of a package that is already controversial: it proposes $73 billion for defense, primarily for the wildly unpopular Iran War, and intelligence, plus $12 billion for farm aid.
Some fiscal hawk House Republicans insist spending should be paid for — and they would want the $73 billion it contains for defense and intelligence to be paid for by controversial cuts, like the brutal ones to Medicaid and food stamps that paid for the reconciliation bill that contained Trump’s tax cuts in 2025.
So, the bill could fail in the House for fiscal policy reasons.
The House is expected to consider the budget resolution this week.
House Republicans have given few particulars about the provisions for the $10 billion election-related portion to date and even on the floor they may not provide all the details of the voting restriction proposals.
It is tactically in their interest to stay vague and flexible.
That was often true of budget resolutions in the past.
Looking back at the so-called “Big Beautiful” budget reconciliation in 2025, only some of the details were in the budget resolution.
Much was kept vague and flexible until the final reconciliation bills.
For example, it was very difficult to get enough Senate Republicans to swallow the ultimate cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and so these were negotiated and resolved, not in the budget resolution, but only at the last minute, at the very end of the Senate’s consideration of the reconciliation bill.
(On the other hand, many House Republicans may want to be vociferous in maximalist demands for SAVE Act policies, choosing polemical vigor over tactical restraint.)
This current budget resolution and later the reconciliation bill could fail for any number of institutional or political reasons.
Members of the appropriations committees in both chambers hate to see their power and influence stolen away by the budget process.
There is the general independence from Trump that has been shown by Sen.
Thom Tillis (R-NC), who announced he plans to try to block the bill, and others who are retiring.
There is the distaste for the SAVE Act among some Republican Senators.
Four Senate Republicans voted against a past amendment with the SAVE act – Collins, Murkowski, McConnell and Tillis.
Even some House Republicans are queasy about the vote-by-mail restrictions that Trump has championed and wants included in any version of the SAVE Act up for vote.
Moreover, even if the budget resolution passes, last year, the subsequent reconciliation bill with money for ICE took six weeks.
It is late in the Congress to devote that kind of time.
When the Senate takes up the budget resolution, perhaps in August, proponents will have a tight squeeze getting the needed votes.
But procedurally, Republican proponents can hope it will survive the Parliamentarian’s review.
Their strategy might be for the resolution’s language to not say much more than that it gives $10 billion to the states for election operations.
If it says anything else, it may say something anodyne — such as it is for state program reform operations related to voting administration to combat fraud.
By saying little, proponents can argue that so far it is just a vague, general fiscal measure, i.e., not having any particulars that could be called unrelated, and in budget terms “extraneous,” to the fiscal measure.
It would not be impossible for the Senate Parliamentarian to let initial vague, general budget resolution language go by while reserving judgment for what really matters, the reconciliation bill itself, not because she is being permissive, or yielding, only that she can take the patient position that there is nothing much yet to rule on.
But it will be a grim prospect if the budget resolution survives its initial hurdle and carries this thinly veiled, massive voter suppression project any distance down the field.
So, ultimately, in the reconciliation bill, what might proponents of some version of the Trump project try to use to concretize the vague $10 billion provision?
At one extreme, what Trump (and probably most House Republicans) would like, would be to give out the money conditioned on the states agreeing to follow the SAVE Act.
Of course, most observers consider that extreme to be dead on arrival as a flagrant violation of reconciliation rules.
At the other extreme is to find magical ways to devote all the money in a very completely direct way not requiring any state voting law or rule changes.
One former Senate aide said of a workable provision: “They could probably provide money to states for voter fraud enforcement or creating/enhancing voter ID requirements, but the number of strings put on the money would have to be pretty minimal to pass muster.”
This is a realistic assessment.
But, $10 billion is a lot of money to spend on simple enforcement, and it is unclear how to spend billions enhancing voter ID requirements without “strings” to changes in state laws.
That may be so watered-down and attenuated there is no actual reconciliation bill action there to enact.
In between the two extremes, the tension is for the reconciliation bill’s language to propose ways to purport to be directly spending somehow in the direction of the SAVE Act goals – to make it fiscal – although it is not clear how to do that.
In particular, only a dozen states require proof of citizenship.
Most states just have the voter formally declare their citizenship, and rely on that declaration, especially since there are extremely few cases of voting by people who are not citizens, Trump’s myths aside.
It is hard to see imposing the documentation of citizenship as anything but a way of pushing millions of proper citizen voters off the rolls.
Trying to use the reconciliation bill to secure changes of new state laws or rules, necessitating everyone lose their voting rights until they provide rigid documentary proof of their citizenship, whatever the phony fiscal camouflage, seems likely to ring the alarm bell about exceeding what can go in a reconciliation bill.
So then what?
To provide a ballpark, a study called The Cost of Conducting Elections estimated a few years ago that state and local costs to conduct elections were $5 billion.
So conceivably an ultimate form proposed for the reconciliation bill could offer to use the $10 billion to shoulder the entire costs for all the agreeable states of all their election operations, so long as they spend for operations for diverse steps not against their existing laws.
Employing the line of using the money without changing state laws could be a crude approximation of what is deemed fiscal in reconciliation, although the Parliamentarian may use more refined tests for what is incidental.
This starts with voter fraud enforcement and creating voter ID requirements.
Probably proponents would also try saying that the dozen states already with laws on proof of citizenship could be funded to step up their operations.
More dubiously, they might seek some way to propose that states that currently accept declarations could, without demanding proof, somehow step up operations to internally cross-check the declarations.
The proponents would also like a grant program for states to make more intense, citizenship-based use of the existing “Real ID,” the formalized drivers licenses.
“Real ID” is an existing law, which helps a little with proponents arguing that grant programs are viable in reconciliation, although it is a stretch to say major new legislative proposals for what to do with “Real ID” remain still primarily fiscal.
And, there is the murky subject of stepping up the operations of states purging voter rolls, although not as much as the SAVE Act would — to change law to purge without notifying voters — but as, for example, sending check-up letters to the past addresses of voters who have been inactive a long time.
Twenty-two states have laws for doing this, and proponents could say the funding would help step up those operations, but achieving big impact would seem to require changes in laws or rules arguably incidental to the money.
At some point, of course, Trump could put his foot down and say he wants so much more in this attenuated bill, but, if he does so, he may well collapse the fragile legitimating structure of his ostensible reconciliation bill, which he is pressuring Congress to pass, against wise advice from his own Senate leadership.
And Trump or his senators might pull an extreme plan and call for appealing an adverse ruling of the Chair following the Parliamentarian, and getting a Senate vote to overrule the Chair.
But, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has put the kibosh on that cheating notion every time it has been raised.
Thune will sanction some extreme uses of reconciliation, such as how he got the Trump tax cuts made permanent in 2025 by using a bogus baseline, but, he has not at all considered rolling the respected Parliamentarian.
It seems doubtful Congress wants to start paying for all state and local election operations, keeping in mind that many states would annoy the bill proponents by spurning the “gift” of funded federal interference in their election operations.
Also, that the bill’s restraining itself to what states can do without changing the existing laws or rules on the books for proof of citizenship and so forth does not put much of a bandage on the provision’s blatant faults.
But this example shows what is involved in coming up with a provision that the proponents might persuade Majority Leader Thune to ask the Senate Parliamentarian to consider, because at least it purports to be about spending the $10 billion on elections, and aiming for the middle ground between any very large part of the SAVE Act (a sure loser), and none of it.
It’s all part of a bid to give Trump what he wants, one way or another.
It remains entirely possible that the Parliamentarian might still rule that the language, addressing voter ID and citizenship and so forth even with self-restraint, was merely incidental, rather than primarily and directly fiscal and throw the thing out.
There have been times in the past where one version of a provision was tried on the Senate Parliamentarian, and after it was rejected, another version was tried.
But a fatal flaw in the first version may still be a fatal flaw in the second.
Proponents of any measure like the SAVE Act must accomplish the miracle of having credible legislative solutions, not the febrile imaginations of the President on this subject.
We cannot help but be conjectural at this stage, but even this look into a cloudy crystal ball is better preparation than no look at all.
We may be in for a rough, lengthy and dangerous struggle to protect voting rights.
So far, the SAVE Act has never succeeded.
There is a lot of reason to doubt it can make it this time if opponents remain steadfast.
Let us hope its failure becomes permanent.
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