Safeguarding Elections: Senator Mike Lee on the SAVE Act and Citizen-Only Voting

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to Spaces with Josie.

I'm your host, Josie, the Red Headed Libertarian.

My guest today is Senator Mike Lee.

Welcome, Mike.

Thank you.

Good to be with you.

Great.

And what should I call you throughout this?

Should I call you Mike?

Senator Mike Lee?

Senator Lee?

You can call me Mike.

You can call me whatever you want.

I've been called just about everything in the book, and I'm fine with it.

And I'm one of seven children, so I was also accustomed to answering to whatever name

happened to escape the mouth of either my mother or my father.

So, you know, when you got that many kids, it's easier to confuse them.

Absolutely.

I get that I'm the second of four, so, you know, sometimes they throw the pets in there

too.

That happens.

That happens.

Try not to take offense, you know.

Exactly.

I totally, totally get that.

I'm really excited for this conversation to happen tonight because it's something that's

very important to me and very important to you.

But real quick, can you just give, for somebody who might be new in this space, who are

you?

What do you do?

My name is Mike Lee.

I'm a senator from the state of Utah, and I'm a Republican.

I'm also the author of a bill called the Save America Act, which we're trying to push

through the Senate.

The Save America Act has two fundamental components.

It requires you to establish citizenship at the time of voter registration and show up

with photo ID at the time of voting.

We've got to make sure that Americans only are voting and that they are who they say

they are when they vote.

Absolutely.

So what inspired you, and is this one that you did with Chip Roy, or with, okay, perfect?

So what inspired you to write this?

Was there something alarming that you were saying, a pattern of what, what was the motive?

About two years ago, Chip Roy and I started talking.

We had been brought into this conversation by a number of people who are active in the

space, including our friend, Cleedham Mitchell.

He's a fantastic lawyer and also a conservative activist who was on the cutting edge of just

about every election integrity issue in America.

Cleedham started explaining to both of us that there was a little known feature brought

about by a Supreme Court case that we had read at the time it came out and kind of forgotten

about.

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court decided a case called Arizona versus Intertribal Council.

In that case, the Supreme Court interpreted the 1993 Motor Voter Law, known as the National

Voter Registration Act, or NVRA.

The Supreme Court had interpreted that law wrongly, but nonetheless conclusively, as prohibiting

the states from requesting any form of identification, any type of proof of citizenship from anyone

as they registered a vote if they're using the NVRA form, meaning if somebody shows up

to a DMV in any of the participating states and 48 or 49 of the 50 participate, they can fill

out an application for a driver's license.

And all they have to do is check a box on that application, sign their name at the bottom,

certifying, you know, I'm eligible to vote, I'm a citizen, and I'm not subject to any legal

impediment against me voting.

And then you're registered to vote, including in any federal election.

The Supreme Court said that even where the state has affirmative reason to believe that

it might be registering non-citizens to vote, which is illegal, they can't ask for any

kind of proof of citizenship.

So I realized that this was a problem, it was a growing problem, since the moment the

NVRA was passed in 1993, a number of things have happened.

I mentioned the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in the Arizona case, where the Supreme Court

wrongly but conclusively said you can't ask for any proof of citizenship.

At about the same time that was happening, there was a trend that has continued to this

very day, where it used to be that your ability to get a driver's license was affirmatively

in doubt or actively prohibited, in many cases, if you were a non-citizen.

But over the last two and a half decades, we've gotten to the point where nearly every

state will issue a driver's license to a non-citizen.

And 19 states plus DC will freely issue your driver's license even if they know you

are an illegal alien.

And so all those things added up, coupled with the fact that between 2021 and 2025, while

Joe Biden was president, we let in between 10 and 15 million illegal immigrants into the

United States.

You add all that stuff up and it just gets really messy and you realize that we urgently

need action.

This is a play and motion.

Even to the extent they haven't actively consciously used it on a widespread basis thus far.

And I'm not willing to concede that point, but if you were to imagine that you could concede

that hypothetically, it still would no longer be a safe assumption that they wouldn't do it

in large numbers down the road.

I'm hearing back initial reports, USCIS is doing a review on this.

Having reviewed only maybe 60 million voter registration files in America, they've already

found tens of thousands of likely non-citizens who have registered to vote.

And that doesn't include most of the blue states which so far have refused to give USCIS their

information.

It's going to get a lot worse than this and this is why we need to get this thing passed

now.

Excellent.

Now what forms of identification are required under this?

Good question.

All right.

So the default, again, there are two separate requirements.

The time you register to vote, you've got to prove citizenship.

The gold standard for that would be documentation similar to what you have to provide every time

you start a new job with a new employer.

You have to fill out a form called the I-9.

The I-9 requires you if you are an American to prove your US citizenship.

If you're not an American, then you've got to show that you've got a visa and that that

visa allows you to work and that that work visa encompasses the type of work in the field

where you'll be working in that job.

So with the I-9, you've got to produce either a valid US passport or alternatively a birth

certificate, a Social Security card, and a photo ID.

All those that same set of documentation will suffice in the case of the Save America

Act, but you don't have to have that.

In fact, there's a provision that says even if you don't have any documents, let's say

your house burns down or something or you're dog-aided.

You just can't find any of your documentation.

All 50 states will be required to allow you to attest to your own citizenship and the

facts that establish it through an affidavit, a statement made in writing under oath.

And then you submit that to the state and then it becomes the state's obligation to either

confirm or refute the status of your US citizenship.

My point is this, it's really easy.

It's way easier to comply with the Save America Act to establish your US citizenship than

it is any time you've ever applied for, taken a new job.

And if you're an American citizen, you've had to do this every time you have a job change.

So this is not hard, not hard at all, some on the other side of the aisle want to make

it out of such, but it's not.

Yeah, when I moved from Massachusetts to Florida, I had to go through this process just to

get a driver's license and it was a little more than I'm used to, but I only had to do

it once.

And it worked fine.

So what the left is saying is that women, married women in particular are going to have

difficulty voting and Chuck Schumer has taken it a step further and he said this is Jim

Crow 2.0, are women disenfranchised and is this Jim Crow 2.0 centrally?

Infatically no, not just no, but heck no, I mean this is absurd.

All right, so let's take the married women question first.

To suggest that married women are somehow incapable of demonstrating who they are showing

their citizenship, flies in the face of everything we know about women in the workplace, about

women when they register to vote, when they go to get a driver's license, go to get a

passport, women are more than capable of doing this, moreover, Joseph, this legislation

makes it phenomenally easy for them to do so.

If you're going down the usual documentation path, obviously when you're born and unless

you just happen to have married someone who has the same last name that you were born

with, which be easy, let's take the Eleanor Roosevelt example.

She was born Eleanor Roosevelt, she later married Franklin D Roosevelt, her name was still

Roosevelt.

If you're in that circumstance, you got nothing to worry about, but even if you're not

and you're like almost every other person, every other woman in America who gets married

and chooses to take on her husband's name and that name is not the same as the name

listed on her birth certificate, you show a copy of your marriage license, your marriage

certificate and that does it.

You can't find it, you establish that by affidavit, it couldn't be easier.

The Jim Crow 2.0 argument is even more infuriating.

First of all, think about this, Joseph, this is the party that literally invented Jim Crow.

The party of Jim Crow is the Democratic Party.

They should not be enthusiastically conjuring images of their own racist past.

This is what they are, this is what they do, this is their party's DNA.

Now I'm not saying that they are still all about Jim Crow today, they're not, they can't

be, it'd be unconstitutional, it would violate a whole host of laws for them to do so, they're

not.

But it's weird that they're channeling this argument, given that they are in fact the

party of Jim Crow.

And this is the furthest thing from Jim Crow.

One of the arguments they're trying to make is that, oh, this is the like so many other

Jim Crow policies, this is a poll tax, what?

A poll tax is a fee that you make people pay at the time and place of voting as a condition

precedent for being able to vote.

Now the 24th amendment ratified in the 1960s makes poll taxes unconstitutional.

So it's been nearly, it's been roughly 60 years since any of that has even been constitutional.

That's not what this is.

To call it a poll tax, they're saying that there are some people who might, in some circumstances,

can counter a mild marginal fee for obtaining a copy of, for example, their birth certificate.

Now, it's a huge logical leap to call that a poll tax because it is not.

First of all, this is a nominal sum in many, if not most states, you can get those either

for free or at a subsidized rate.

Regardless, you're talking about a few dollars for a certified copy of something.

This is not difficult to do, but they're wanted to call it a poll tax because they're

out of other good arguments to make.

But under no circumstances, anybody have to pay anything to get these documents because

even if you don't have them, you fill out an affidavit for free and the state does the

rest.

Yes, exactly, and you know, if they're trying to call buying, or I guess purchasing a copy

of your marriage license for 10 or 20 bucks usually, they're trying to call that a poll

tax, then under the second amendment, we all need free guns because buying a gun means

that I'm being disenfranchised from defending myself.

Yes.

There's a lot.

Oh, that's a logical conclusion.

That's exactly right.

And you know, that reminds me of another bill I just introduced.

I'd love to talk to you about it sometime.

It's called the National Constitutional Carey Act because I believe, you know, my copy

of the second amendment does not say, by the way, your second amendment rights are entirely

dependent on your ability to get a permit from your state, a permit that will then cease

to be meaningful as soon as you cross state lines and go into another state.

So the permit is itself the Constitution.

You don't need another one.

You should be able to constitutionally carry regardless of what state you happen to be

in.

Exactly.

If your marriage can be recognized in states, then why can't your gun license?

Exactly.

Exactly.

You know, I mean, I don't need a permit here in Florida.

In my opinion, the state should all kind of go that way, but they have, they have the

right to regulate to an extent in each state under the Constitution to the 10th amendment.

So, President Trump has come out and endorsed the SAVAC saying he's not going to sign anything

until it gets passed.

Can you elaborate on this?

Yeah.

Look, I'm so grateful to President Trump for his leadership on this.

It was ecstatic, of course, instead of the union, I was sitting maybe 15 or 20 feet

from him when he said it, but when he came out and endorsed it aggressively, I was, of

course, cheering enthusiastically.

But over the weekend, he was even more specific.

He said, not only is this the most important issue in front of Congress right now, something

he had acknowledged instead of the union interest, but I'm not going to support anything else

that you do between now and then.

This is immensely helpful because he knows that we're sitting on this.

He knows that there's more we could be doing on it.

It's not easy.

Our path to victory is not certain.

I've never guaranteed anyone that if we use the talking filibuster, it will definitely

pass.

I believe it will, but there are no guarantees in life.

Certainly not in any legislative process.

You can't just assume that any of this is going to work and that you're going to succeed

and that there's no risk to it.

Trump sees that the Senate Republicans are delaying this because, well, we're creatures

of habit, creatures of certainty.

So he's adding in his own certainty, saying, okay, well, if that's the way you're going

to play, then I will give you certainty.

Nothing else you do is going to matter until you get this done.

Why?

Well, because this is necessary to save America.

The fate of our republic is not just the Republican party that's on the line.

It is the fate of the American Republic itself.

Our system really relies ultimately on the credibility of our elections.

And if our elections aren't secure and if they are perceived as being less than secure,

this whole thing falls apart.

So we've got to get this done.

Can you clear up something that he had written?

He had shared that we need to pass the save.

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But then he added on no more mutilation of children.

He added on the trans agenda.

Now, people were confused about this.

They're wondering if that is attached to the Save Act or if he was trying to suggest it

should be attached to the Save Act or what he meant when he conflated the two.

Yeah, I think he would like to see those other items added on to the Save America Act.

They would save America.

Yes.

Yes.

And those are all good things and I support all of them.

The bill that we would be proceeding to is the House-Past version of the Save America

Act, which includes the two major features that I described a few minutes ago.

Does not include these three other elements, including restrictions on male and bounding,

and surgeries, and eligibility of biological men to enter into a women's restroom or plan

a women's sports team.

These are all proposals that I would support, but they would have to be added either by

amendment in the Senate or they would have to be added onto a new bill and asked for

representatives and then passed over the same way.

The way that the House of Representatives passed this Save America Act version that they

passed a few weeks ago is significant in that it's ready to come onto the Senate now.

We can move to that.

We can proceed to it without any cloture vote.

Cloture is the process by which we take a supermajority of senators, three-fist or 60 senators.

We bring debate to a close, either on the bill itself or sometimes at the front end.

We have what some describe as front end cloture, cloture on the motion to proceed, is often

the first step that we take when we decide that it's time to move to a piece of legislation.

We don't have to go through that stage of it with this one because it's passed by the

House, it's sent over to us in the form of a message, they utilize different rules to

send different pieces of legislation to us.

This one allows us to proceed to it without a front end cloture vote, and so that's why

we would need to start with that one.

As to whether all of the presidents' changes or any of them in particular could get added

on by the House in the form of a separate bill, that's going to be up to Mike Johnson and

the House Republicans, otherwise we will proceed with what they started and then see what

we could add to it by way of amendment.

Now what everybody's been waiting for, what is the talking filibuster?

Yeah.

Okay.

Talking filibuster, the best way to understand it is, it's the filibuster.

From the dawn of the American Republic, since 1789 when the US Senate first came into existence,

we have had a default rule, the default rule has been, if a senator wants to speak, wants

to debate, he or she may do so, as long as he or she chooses to do so, and is able physically

to stand on the Senate floor and speak.

For certain limitations to this, you can speak only twice on the same legislative day on

the same legislative matter, and there were some other limitations to it, but for the

first 120, 130 years of the Senate's existence, even if everyone else in the Senate wanted

to move on, but one senator wanted to debate, that one senator got to carry the day and there

was nothing they could do to shut him down.

In 1917, the Senate adopted something known as the Cloture Rule.

Today, it's embodied in rule 22 of the Senate rules.

The Cloture Rule says that a supermajority of senators may vote to force debate to come

to a close.

Initially, the Cloture threshold was three-fourths, a few decades later, they changed it to two-thirds,

a few decades after that, they changed it to three-fifths where it stands today, which

is where you get the rule of 60.

You can force debate to come to a close with 60 votes, but a lot of people have taken

to assuming that that means you have to have 60 votes to pass legislation.

It's not technically true.

Most of the time, it's true as a practical matter, but it's not technically true to say that

you can't pass anything with a simple majority because technically it all passes with a simple

majority.

It's just most of the time you have to bring debate to a close first before you can get

a simple up or down passage.

What then is the talking filibuster?

Over the last few decades, we've gotten weak.

We've gotten kind of lax in the way we enforce the filibuster.

We've gotten in enough shell to the point where you don't really have to speak.

You don't even have to show up to the Senate itself.

You just indicate that you're not going to support Cloture, or you cast a vote against

Cloture on one occasion, and then if Cloture fails, then everyone's expected to just forget

about that legislation.

It's gone for the time being.

It's become the default tool now, the zombie filibuster, meaning you don't actually have

to speak, and you can continue to have the benefit of the filibuster.

You could be asleep, take a nap at the bar, and Tahiti drinking drinks with some kind

of an umbrella thing on top, and still get the benefit of a filibuster.

Now, that's fine for some of the time, but on legislation like this one, Josie, where

we've got 85% of the American people on board with this, they want this.

This one's not just about Republicans versus Democrats.

I mean, right now we don't have any Democrats in the Senate who are supporting it, but it's

not just about Democrats versus Republicans in the Senate.

This is really about the American people versus Congress.

The only people who, regardless, is terribly controversial, are not just Democrats, but

Democrats in Congress.

Everybody else realizes this is a no-brainer.

This is an existential threat to any society that operates on the basis of free, secure elections.

If your election ceased to be secure, they don't mean much, and with it, your constitutional

republic becomes insignificant in love itself.

So here's how the talking filibuster would work here.

We bring this to the floor through a simple majority vote on a motion to proceed, because

of the way it's coming over from the House of Representatives.

We would not immediately file cloture on the bill, as has become our custom in the Senate,

followed by a custom of the minute that that cloture vote appears that it's going to fail,

or it does fail, that we walk away from it and say, add, never mind, we tried.

It's too hard.

Can't do anything about it, so we're going to have to move on to something else.

We don't do that this time.

We let it hang.

Let it hang, ideally, for a few weeks, at least a few weeks.

And you make them go down to the floor, and anyone who opposes it, who wants to fill

a buster, should have to go to the floor, and speak at length about why they don't support

the bill.

So how does this work then?

Well, let me give you the best parallel to it, is a law that was passed before I was seven

or eight years before I was born, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came to the Senate

under somewhat similar circumstances, where it passed in the House of Representatives.

It was popular with the American people, not as popular as the Save America Act is.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the time it passed the House of Representatives in March

of 1964, was supported by about 51 between 51 and 54 percent of the American population.

Save America, more like 85 percent.

Save America is also simpler, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is far more complicated.

Most importantly, Joseph, they had to overcome a 32-vote cloture deficit.

There were 32 votes shy.

There were only 10 votes shy of cloture.

So our obstacle that we have to overcome is far less of a hill to climb than theirs was

at the time.

They left it on the floor for 60 days and required filibustering senators to speak.

And after 60 days, a bunch of them found that nothing sharpens the mind, quite like having

to show up and explain to the American people, day after day after day.

Why does the American people all want something?

But you and your petulant desire to keep it from becoming law are going to lock up all

of your colleagues and make them sit there in a mostly empty Senate chamber day after

day.

That worked its magic, silence, stun them into action, and they're being forced to speak

amidst all the other silence, got them to the point that they were able to close that

cloture deficit.

They were able to achieve cloture and they got the bill passed.

And thank you, Evan, for all the people who have benefited from the Civil Rights Act

of 64.

Thank you all.

Great for what a great debt of gratitude they owe to those people who had the vision and

the courage to say, yeah, sure, we don't have anywhere close to a cloture margin here.

We're really far from cloture.

Thank heavens.

They didn't just hang it up and say, let's go home.

Let's go to the bar.

Let's go to the beach.

Whatever it is.

They got it done.

They do the same thing here.

That's what the talking filibuster is all about.

Again, the talking filibuster is just the filibuster.

It's what the filibuster used to be.

The zombie filibuster is what we become used to where we allow them to filibuster even

if they're asleep.

Yes.

And the filibuster for the 1964 Civil Rights Act was led by the Democrats and it was the

longest filibuster in the history of our country.

That's right.

That's right.

So, Tom Tillis, whether he means to or not, has conflated the talking filibuster with

nuking the filibuster.

Why aren't those things the same?

What's the difference?

They're not only not the same thing.

They're quite the opposite of one another, which is why I find it so amusing whenever

anyone, whether it's a colleague who should know better or someone else who should know

better, conflating the talking filibuster with nuking the filibuster, that's crazy.

Just as an introductory matter, this is a little bit like saying, if you're in the tabernacle

choir, lovely musical group, broadcast weekly from my home state of Utah, if you're in

the tabernacle choir, you should be required to sing.

After all, that's what the tabernacle choir does.

It sings.

It's like saying that anyone who tells members of the choir that they have to sing, that

they're against singing, that is about as logical as it is to say if you are an advocate

of invoking the talking filibuster to pass the Save America Act, you want to nuked the

filibuster.

This is just not true.

So, let me back up a little bit and explain what I mean by all of this and why it is not

just a fair characterization, but it's completely opposite of the truth, or as home, let's

see.

If you ever watch The Simpsons, there's a great lawyer on The Simpsons who ran a law firm

call, I can't believe it's not a law firm.

His name was F. Lionel Hudson, he would get up and he would say, ladies and gentlemen

of the jury, he was not a very good lawyer.

My client is not only guilty, he is also innocent of being not guilty, like this accusation

that they have made about the talking filibuster being canned about to nuking the filibuster,

he is not only guilty of being false, it's also innocent of being not guilty, Lionel

Hudson would say.

So, nuking the filibuster is the name that we have assigned to the Senate for what happens

if you go to the Senate floor and you say, I know that it takes 60 votes to get to cloture,

and I know that we don't have 60 votes here and we just cast a vote to try to get to 60

votes on cloture and we didn't succeed, but a simple majority of us now are going to

vote to overturn the ruling of the chair on that cloture vote failing because we're now

just going to break the rules of the Senate in order to rewrite the rules of the Senate.

In other words, it takes 67 votes to change a Senate rule, nuking the filibuster in

theory allows you to go in and with a simple majority, 51 votes, to basically look the

presenting officer in the eye and say, we're going to treat 51 as if it were 60.

So, it is a nihilistic and lawless exercise, and the reason they call it the nuclear option

or nuking the filibuster is that anyone who uses it can't expect that it will bring

about a series of retaliatory actions by the other party.

Everything in the Senate operates on the basis of unanimous consent and exhaustion, and

the two go hand in hand.

In the minute you nuked the filibuster, you deprive yourselves as the majority party of

the ability to secure anything like the other party's full cooperation in the day-to-day

operation of the Senate, which really does take unanimous consent to do just about anything.

It's time to recess so that the respective parties can meet together in their coccuses

or conferences or otherwise.

It all requires cooperation and unanimous consent, that's why nobody wants to nuk it.

So, I don't know where Tom Tillis is getting this idea, but he's wrong, he's dead wrong,

he could not be more wrong if he tried, and so is everyone else who's equating this

to nuking the filibuster.

So can you explain why they can't nukes the filibuster for this one thing and then

unnuk it for everything else?

Yeah.

It's like getting a little bit pregnant, like you either are or you're not, you nuk it

and it's nuked, there's nothing left to nuk.

You can't just say I'm gonna nuk it a little bit and then unnuk it the next day, it's

not how it works.

Once you nuk it, you're in a completely different world, the Senate rules beyond that point

are essentially auditory, they are advisory only, and it's just that the bare majority

makes up the rules as they go along, so that doesn't work.

Good to know.

I remember I think it was a Harry Reid who nuked the filibuster and H. McClell used against

him to get scotus or Supreme Court judges, right?

Yes.

So in November of 2013, Harry Reid, for everyone who solves crime from their couch, knows

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It wasn't a full nuk of the filibuster, it was a tactical, narrowly focused, nuclear

response to what was then the application of the cloture rule in the context of presidential

nominees.

Now, it was wrong, it was lawless, it brought about a whole series of retaliatory actions,

but it was on a relatively small portion of the Senate's work completely outside of

legislation.

It operated only on the Senate at any given time, is it has three states of being.

It is always functioning either as a legislative body, in executive session, it's an executive

session where it reviews presidential nominees and treaties, or as a court of impeachment.

So it's always operating in one of those three states of being.

The tactical nuk, deployed by Harry Reid in November of 2013, applied only on the executive

calendar.

He tried to narrowly tailor it, back to this point of can't you just nuk it a little bit.

He tried to narrowly tailor it and say, oh, this will apply only with respect to non-supreme

court nominees, nominated during a half-gibbous or waning gibbous moan in a month ending in

why, I mean, exaggerating slightly, but he tried to narrow it.

He tried to make it sound as if this was only going to apply to a limited set of nominees

on the executive calendar.

We all know the truth, which was that once you nuk any piece of the executive calendar

or the entire part is nuked as far as the cloacher rule is concerned.

And years later, we got three Supreme Court justices confirmed by President Trump in his

last term using that same precedent.

So it does come back to bite the other side.

They're saying that if you don't nuk the filibuster, when the Democrats get power again,

they're going to nuk the filibuster and pass everything.

Do you believe that there's any truth to that?

I think that is entirely possible.

It scares me, though.

It's all the more reason why we've got to do everything we possibly can right now to

make sure that we don't make it too easy for Democrats to just roll over us in November,

because then if they roll over us in November, they'll roll over us again using the same

techniques in 2028, and then they'll nuk the filibuster.

They won't do it after winning in November because it's only to your advantage to nuk

anything.

But all three of the levers of the two political branches, meaning two levers in the legislative

branch, the House and the Senate, and the White House being the third lever, you only

even want to consider that when you get all three levers under the control of one party,

which they won't, even if things go swimmingly well for them.

In November, at a minimum, they're still knocking out the White House.

I hope they don't have either the House or the Senate, but we've got some control over

that.

We've got this loaded gun, if you pardon the expression, with the ability to deploy large

sums of non-citizen voters, and may not make a difference in every race, but in some

it might, in some it almost inevitably will, if based on what I'm seeing so far on what

USCIS has uncovered, on the number of likely non-citizen voters registered in America, this

really could make a difference.

So anyway, back to the question, why don't we just nuke it now?

Biggest reason is that we don't have the votes.

It would take 51 votes to do it.

We don't have anywhere close to the number of votes to do that.

There's also an argument here that you don't want to do it unless you've exhausted every

other alternative.

I don't believe we have exhausted every alternative.

And in fact, I'm certain that we haven't.

We could and we should use the talking filibuster, if that doesn't work, let's explore other

options.

But it makes no sense to explore other options like nuke that have all kinds of negative

side effects attached to them unless you first try something else without all the same ramifications.

So the senators on the Republican side who haven't signed on with this yet, that's Mitch

McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and Tom Tillis?

Yeah, those are the three who are not supportive of the Save America Act.

Every other Senate Republican is.

And so that gets us up to 50 with JD Vance available to break the tie as Vice President

of the United States and President of the Senate, we would win that vote.

So anything that's cast at a simple majority, we can win on this.

I would love it if we could pull over each of those three Republicans you mentioned.

But even if we don't, we've got enough votes to pass this at a simple majority threshold.

And we've certainly got enough votes to pass a motion to proceed to this.

And I believe we get on that.

We stay on it for a few weeks.

We make them debate.

We make them explain under the light of day on the Senate floor while standing there,

making their case day in, day out, day after day.

They'll get to the point where their minds will be sharpened by the exercise.

He wants to be that person who's standing there, explaining why a patently legitimate,

patently much needed piece of legislation is dying just because of your own petulant

desire to score cheap political points for your own party.

And the longest filibuster in the last 25 years was 25 hours and that was Cory Booker,

is that correct?

Yeah, he got, it was 24 or 25 hours.

I don't remember what the exact time was, it was quite a feat of strength.

This one doesn't necessarily require for any one of those speeches to be long, they can

play tag team.

But the rule is, unless or until cloture has been infoked, those who want to debate may

continue to do so.

And they may speak for long periods of time or shorter periods of time.

There are theoretical limits to it.

You're limited to two speeches on the same legislative day, on the same legislative matter.

The Senate has the ability, if it wants to, to remain on the same legislative day for

multiple counter days, in fact for weeks at a time, if they choose to, and I believe

they did that in 1964 as well, where we were 60 days on the same legislative day.

But at the end of the day, we didn't win that one in 1964, directly through the rigid

enforcement of the rule 19 to speech rule.

We ran it instead through the principle of exhaustion.

We exhausted them physically and we exhausted them politically because their own voter has

got tired of listening to them, drawn on and on about how they didn't want to build

the past.

The same would happen here, I believe it would perhaps happen even faster because this

bill is simpler and it's even more popular than the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was.

And we've got a, a cloture deficit, roughly one-third of the size of what we were facing

in 1964.

So what'll happen is eventually these senators just give up and decide to vote towards

cloture?

Yeah, they, well, they give up or what happened in 1964 was, again, it's sharpened

but they're thinking on it because when you actually have to do something affirmative

in order to keep up the filibuster, it has a way of getting you to think about things

in a way that you haven't previously thought about them.

What happened in 1964 was, we're losing this.

This bill is getting more popular, the longer we speak against it, the more we delay,

the worse we're making our case.

And so they got to the point where they said, let's, let's negotiate some changes so that

we can feel comfortable voting for it.

They did make some changes, they amended that into into the bill and at the end of the

day, they passed it because they got 32 of them to switch spots and to support cloture

where they had previously been unwilling to do so.

And John Thune was saying this, bringing this to the floor means unlimited debate and

unlimited amendments.

So that would mean if there's amendments proposed and everyone's like, you know what, that's

a really good idea and they vote simple majority for that, then that would have to go back

to the House, right?

Yes.

If we were to make changes in the bill, it would have to go back to the House.

Some of my colleagues are worried about what that would mean for, let's say, Republican

senators who are up for reelection or don't want to take this or that tough vote.

I get it, but I've got two responses to that.

Number one, as Mitch McConnell used to tell us when he was our majority leader, if you

don't want to fight fires, don't become a fireman.

And if you don't want to cast tough votes, don't become a lawmaker.

It's what we do.

We cast tough votes and sometimes we have to cast a lot of them.

So that by itself shouldn't be a reason why we should be afraid of that.

Secondly, with some regularity, we can and do in the Senate respond to what happens when

somebody pushes a lot of amendments on us and asks for a lot of votes.

We can table them.

We can just vote them down one right after another.

In fact, we do it all the time.

There are other circumstances in which the Senate finds itself in a posture of unlimited

debate and unlimited amendments.

For example, on what we call budget reconciliation, you recall that's what we used last summer

to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Those are subject to an unlimited amendment process, literally unlimited amendments.

And yet the principle of exhaustion plays in and eventually the will to continue debating

that stuff in the Senate, dwindles, and the party in the majority that wants to pass something

through reconciliation as ways of coordinating, so they say, look, even if you like something

that a particular amendment does, if we as a group deem that amendment toxic either

the procedural status of the bill or to the bill's ultimate ability to pass.

We have to agree to lock arms and stand together to vote that amendment down, either voting

it out on the merits or voting to table it either way, if the effect is the same.

We do this all the time.

It's not that hard.

And we do it even where it might have something in there that some of our members wish they

could vote for.

It's not that big of a deal.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, the Senate passed a big five bill spending package.

Now, I voted against it because it spent way too much money, it's chock full of billions

of dollars of obscene earmarks.

It gave the Democrats everything they wanted on their wish list.

I found it repellent in almost every way.

And worst of all, it let the Democrats get away with murder by fully funding every aspect

of government important to them, but defunding the Department of Homeland Security.

And even in that bill, I had amendments that should have passed amendments to take out

some of the ridiculous concessions we've made to the Democrats.

And do you know what happened?

Well, a majority of the party didn't work out well for me, but all the Democrats voted

with just enough Republicans to table my amendments to take out the wasteful spending on leftist

projects.

So if proven more than capable and many of the same people complaining now about the

risk of, oh, it'll be awful, we'll have to vote on amendments that we don't like.

A lot of the same people saying that now are the same people who voted my amendments down

and the amendments of other people, like my colleague Eric Schmidt from Missouri had similar

amendments.

He's got voted down as well.

Those same people making that argument are the same people who voted with Democrats to

just table them.

So they've already shown us that this can be handled and it can be handled well.

Absolutely.

It always feels like it's the Republicans who are compromising.

The Democrats are always in lockstep and the Republicans are always the ones compromising.

Yeah, particularly on spending bills, where it's, I find this utterly inexcusable, where

when the Democrats are in power, when they hold the majorities in the House and the Senate

and the White House, we adopt Democrat spending priorities.

And every Democrat votes for those bills and they're joined by just enough Republicans

to get to 60 or 65 or wherever they decide they want the vote to turn out.

And when Republicans are in power, we still pass Democrat priorities and it's still not

entirely uncommon for those bills, those spending bills that are chucked with all kinds of

earmarks to come out, the unite Democrats, nearly every Democrat votes for them.

And just a small handful of Republicans just enough to get it to pass will pass.

So that you're in, you're out, regardless of who's winning the election, it's not uncommon

for us to have Democrats spending priorities governing in Washington, regardless of who's

in the majority.

And that's wrong.

It's time for us to even the score.

This is invoking the talking filibuster on the Save America act is one way to do that.

So how do you invoke the talking filibuster?

How do you move from the zombie filibuster to the talking filibuster?

You proceed to this bill because it's come over from the House of Representatives and

the form of a message.

A message doesn't require front and closure or closure on the motion to proceed.

You instead just call it up and you vote to proceed to it.

That first vote would be at a simple majority threshold.

The Senate voting to proceed to the Save America act as passed by the House of Representatives.

And then here's the tricky part.

The important part.

It's not actually that tricky, not that hard.

You just don't file closure until days or weeks have passed and you feel like you've

moved enough along that you could achieve closure.

Otherwise you keep debating until they're ready to get to that place.

There's also always the possibility that they don't show up, that they don't feel the

team at exactly the right moment.

If you catch them unaware, you might be able to trick them into losing.

It's not likely that they will let that happen, but until that does happen, you make them

continue debating.

You make them eat their vegetables for weeks on end until they're ready to negotiate

for real and get this thing passed.

Look, everybody knows it is not unreasonable to expect that in any free republic you're

going to require that the people who vote in your elections, at least be citizens.

In your wildest dreams, you would never dream of casting a vote in the Italian elections.

If you were not an Italian citizen, so it's crazy here that we would allow anybody to

vote in our elections.

Now, the Democrats like to say, well, it's already illegal.

Already illegal to vote in a U.S. election if you were not a citizen and it carries criminal

penalties.

All true.

That is all very true.

But it's unenforceable.

It's completely unenforceable because of the way the National Voter Registration Act

has been wrongly interpreted by the Supreme Court and because of the way Joe Biden let

10 to 15 million non-citizens into the United States of America and by virtue of the fact

that in basically every state, you can get a driver's license as a non-citizen and you

can apply to register to vote while applying for your driver's license, as long as you're

willing to lie, there's nothing against that.

So yeah, it's a little bit like saying, oh, well, we have laws prohibiting murder if

there was something about them that made them unenforceable.

You would be left out of the room if you said, well, murder is already illegal.

So why do we need another law making it enforceable?

This is absolutely ridiculous.

But they can only hide from this thing for so long.

Does American people know that this is nonsense?

No sane country would allow people to do this, in fact, no sane country does, where they

only want.

Now, John Thune seems to be on board with this now.

What is his responsibility?

He brings it to the floor, right?

He says...

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We're going to vote on this.

You had mentioned calling Quorum, all you have to do is not call to Quorum, is that

something he would do?

Is that something anybody can do?

No.

The big thing I mentioned that he has to not do is file Cloture.

We don't want him filing Cloture.

Cloture, sorry, not Quorum.

Cloture.

And there's an elaborate process that takes a few days for it to ripen.

You file it a Cloture petition.

You get, I believe it's 16 senators to sign on to a document saying, we want to bring

debate to a close, and then after the intervening day has passed and you have a vote, and then

once that vote has been taken, if it passes, then you have up to 30 hours of post-cloture

debate time, depending on who wants to speak.

You just don't do that.

You don't go through the steps of filing Cloture until at least a few weeks have gone by

debating it, because ordinarily our procedure would be to either have a Cloture vote at

the very front end on Cloture on the motion to proceed, or even if you were in one of these

circumstances like we are on this one, with a house pass message, you don't have to have

front end Cloture.

You'd still, in a typical posture, file Cloture relatively soon after proceeding to the

bill.

You don't do that here, because we know that we don't have 60 votes yet.

We want to wait for that moment to arrive, and it arrives by requiring everyone to

debate this issue on the floor, on the merits of the bill itself.

So what can we, the people, do?

What can we do?

The first and most important thing to do is find out where your senators sit, and if

your senators are Republicans, they should be on board with this.

But there are two things you need to find out from them about whether they're on board

with it.

First, do they support the Save America Act, and I can tell you confidently that all Republican

senators, with the exception of a three that you mentioned, senators McConnell, Murkowski

and Tillis, are on board with it and are supportive of the bill.

The second question, which is the more important one, and where there's a lot of ambiguity

right now, do you support the use of the Talking Philobuster in an effort to pass the Save

America Act?

And are you willing to back up later soon in the event that he tries to invoke the Talking

Philobuster because, and, and, and I will say this about, about later a thing, he takes,

he's taking a lot of, a lot of hits from a lot of people right now, and I, I want to

remind people it's not quite as easy as it might appear from his standpoint.

For the simple reason that he can't do it alone, we have to have him.

The, the majority leader has certain procedural prerogatives that no one else has.

So it won't work if he's not on board.

But even if he is on board, if, if we don't have 50 who are willing to stand together

on this, it will quickly fall apart.

So before you get, before you're too hard on John Thune, make sure that you figure

out where your senators stand on this, try to get them on board because I believe once

John Thune sees that he's got 50 Republican senators who are willing to stand together

on this.

To defeat Democrat amendments as they come up, and to keep us in session and debating

this, until we have enough votes to pass it, I believe he'll do it, but he can't do it

on his own.

He's, he's got to make sure that we've got a team that's going to back him up.

One thing that the Democrats are really great on is locking together, being in lockstep,

and that's something the Republicans have to do to get this past.

After one last question, can you just pitch me the save act?

Give your pitch for the save act to all of us.

Any election becomes meaningless if the franchise, that is that the body of electors is open

ended and unlimited.

There's an old expression that goes something like this that says, if everyone's family

than no one is, if everyone is a voter than no one is, especially in a country where

we've got over 30 million non-citizens residing in our country, and probably at least 10, 15,

maybe 20 million or so of those are here illegally, and you're making it excessively easy

for them to vote, you're creating a recipe for a nightmare, for somebody else to commandeer

your own election.

You know, in the years since Donald Trump's first election as president in 2016, you've

heard Democrats ranting and raving for years about foreign election interference, foreign

meddling in our election, Josie, there is nothing that comes close to the amount of foreign

election interference potential that we face right now.

Because when you bring in 10 or 15 million people over a four-year period, you have those

to those who are already here who are either illegal aliens already or who are non-citizens

residing in the United States.

And you do nothing to make sure that they can't vote after your laws have done everything

to make sure that they can vote as long as they're willing to lie, and it's impossible

to catch them.

Your elections are soon going to be rendered meaningless, and we've got to get this done.

The expression comes to mind, I'll quote a Democrat president on this, if not us who,

and if not now when.

John F. Kennedy used that in a very different context than we're using it today, but it

matters to us today.

This ship may not pass this way again, and in fact, if we don't pass this this year,

I'm not certain what's going to happen in this November's election, I really am not,

but I am certain of one thing, if we don't at least try this now, we're going to lose at

least the House, maybe the Senate too.

And we've got to be able to look our constituents in the eye and say, I did everything I possibly

could to make sure that our elections were safe, secure, fair, and honest.

We cannot do that if we don't give this a really good, hard college try.

So let's not be found on the wrong side of history on this one.

Let's get this done right.

This has the potential, I don't want to overstate the comparison, because obviously this is

different than the Civil Rights Act of 64.

It's got a different focus, this bill is much narrower.

But this is another pivotal moment in American history, where the American people want something,

they want it overwhelmingly.

If Republicans, while serving as the custodians, of both chambers of the legislative branch,

we don't fix this, haven't helped us all.

We will not be entrusted with power again.

We will lose, and in some ways we will deserve to lose.

But we have got the ability to get this done and get it done right.

So please join me in the cause, talk to your senators, find out where they are in

Save America.

If they purport to support it, find out what they have done, what they have said publicly

to indicate that they will offer their wholehearted, unqualified support to Leader

John Thune as he invokes the Talking Philobuster to pass the Save America Act.

Thank you so much, Senator, for being here with me today.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Thank you for hanging out with me just for a second after to make sure everything uploads.

Thank you, everybody, for listening in.

If you got here late, as soon as I close this down, you're going to be able to listen to

the whole show again on X, but also we're going to have video dropping tomorrow morning

on Rumble.

You can follow Tim Cassemedia, faces X, Josie over there, and also everywhere you get shows,

it'll be unspotted by it, it'll be on Apple, it'll be on all the places.

But thank you, everybody.

Call your senator, and thank you for being here today.

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