Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced on Thursday that next week he will bring the Republican Party’s voter suppression bill, aka the SAVE America Act, to the Senate floor for debate. Thune’s decision will give Senate Democrats, who oppose the bill, an opportunity to lay out their objections to legislation they have described as a reboot of racist Jim Crow voting laws.
Thune announced his decision in a floor speech and wrote, “Next week, I will bring the SAVE America Act to the floor. Senate Democrats will be forced to defend their outrageous positions on these issues and explain to the American people why common sense and the Democrat Party have parted ways.”
Republicans have argued that the law protects voters, but that isn’t true.
Under the guise of preventing noncitizens from voting (which is already illegal), the legislation includes several measures that would suppress voting across the board—a tactic that has historically been used to help Republicans.
For instance, the law would impose onerous new requirements to prove citizenship before people even register to vote. The Campaign Legal Center estimates that over 21 million Americans—including married people who have changed their names—do not have access to the additional documents the new law would require them to have, cutting off their path to registering to vote.
The bill would also restrict the ability to register to vote by mail and online, push mandatory purges of voting rolls (which could include errors), and allow for the prosecution of election workers simply for helping people to vote.
If the bill became law it would also force states to share private voting information with the federal government, which would empower even more abuses like President Donald Trump’s recent FBI raid on Georgia election offices to prove his bogus election conspiracies.
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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer drew a line in the sand against the bill in a message posted Sunday.
“The SAVE Act is Jim Crow 2.0. It would disenfranchise tens of millions of people,” Schumer wrote. “Senate Democrats will not help pass the SAVE Act under any circumstances.”
To Schumer’s point, the Jim Crow laws put in place in the South following the end of the Civil War were a distinct strategy meant to preserve white supremacy. Rather than allow Black voters to express their political preferences at the ballot box, segregationist state governments and municipalities introduced restriction after restriction on voting, with obstacles like poll taxes and literacy tests specifically erected with an eye toward decreasing Black voter participation.
The NAACP announced its opposition to the SAVE America Act in 2025
“The SAVE Act is nothing more than voter suppression disguised as voter protection. The burdensome requirements disproportionately target voters in historically marginalized communities, amplify systemic inequalities, and aim to silence millions,” NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement.
Senate Republicans like Maine’s Susan Collins, once again shattering her claims to not be a part of the party’s extremist MAGA bloc, support the bill. But the unified Democratic opposition means that the bill is not likely to hit the 60-vote threshold it needs to overcome a filibuster.
Thune has said he won’t throw out the Senate filibuster rule to allow passage but figures like embattled Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who needs MAGA support to win the runoff for his primary race against Ken Paxton, are pushing for the major procedural change.
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Trump has made passage of the bill a top priority, as it contains several measures meant to validate his completely debunked conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump has also pushed for the inclusion of anti-transgender provisions in the bill, including a ban on sports participation and gender reassignment surgery, as part of a plot to reengage conservative voters disappointed by his unpopular presidency.
Republicans are expected to fare poorly in this year’s midterm elections. A series of special elections since last year have consistently been decided in favor of Democrats. GOP attempts to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts have met stiff Democratic opposition.
Changing the federal law to suppress the vote is one of the few avenues left for Republicans, but that gambit already seems doomed to fail.
