March 18, 2026 12:20 PM UTC

Senate Begins Pointless SAVE Act Debate as Gabe Evans Cheers from Sideline

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• by: Colorado Pols

Senate Republicans are trying to focus attention on President Trump’s proposed legislation on voting restrictions, dubbed the “Save America Act,” a clumsy solution in search of a problem that Trump is hoping can prevent massive Democratic victories in the 2026 election.

Senate Republicans don’t actually have the votes to pass what Trump says is the most important thing in the history of ever, so instead they’re going to do the only thing they ever do: Engage in pointless performative politics.

As POLITICO explains:

Republicans kicked off debate Tuesday on the SAVE America Act, a House-passed bill that would create new proof-of-citizenship and photo ID requirements in order for Americans to participate in federal elections. In a bid to pacify House and Senate conservatives, a fervent base flooding their social media mentions and even President Donald Trump — who views the legislation as his “No. 1 priority” — Senate Republicans are expected to spend days, if not weeks, discussing the legislation.

The chances the push will succeed in passing the bill, which Democrats uniformly oppose, are miniscule. And it’s not at all clear that spending two weeks on the bill will be enough to quell what has been an intense GOP-on-GOP pressure campaign that has sucked up much of the focus in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s vote.

“We’ll find out, you know?” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said when asked if he knew if it would be enough to satisfy Trump, who has repeatedly urged Republicans to skirt the 60-vote filibuster to pass the bill. “What I promised from the very beginning is we’ll get it up and we will have a vote. I can’t guarantee the result.”

He added that Trump and others also “want us to nuke the legislative filibuster in order to do it, and that’s also something I’ve been very clear about — there just aren’t the votes.”

The SAVE Act would make it, um, extra illegal for noncitizens to vote. Of course, noncitizens can’t vote in federal elections already, and despite the fearmongering from the White House, actual examples of this sort of voter fraud are EXTREMELY rare. As The Washington Post reported in May 2024:

After the 2016 election, the Brennan Center reviewed 23.5 million votes cast and found about 30 instances of voting by possible noncitizens. That amounts to one vote out of every 770,000 cast.

An official audit in 2022 of Georgia’s voter rolls found about 1,600 noncitizens attempted to register to vote in that state over 25 years, with most of the attempts occurring in the previous six years. None of them were successful, according to the audit.

Facts don’t matter to President Trump, so he wants to establish a new batch of onerous requirements for voting, including proof of citizenship when registering to vote; and presenting government-issued photo identification when attempting to cast a ballot. This would be a massive problem for millions of Americans, particularly for anyone changing their last name after getting married; the Bipartisan Policy Center recently found that 12% of current registered voters do not have ready access to documents proving their citizenship.

The SAVE Act would also all but eliminate mail-in voting, which Coloradans have used successfully for more than a decade but which Trump regularly claims — without evidence — to be rife with fraud. A lesser-discussed concern is that the bill would require states to hand over voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security; if you have been paying any attention to the news over the last 16 months, you already know why this is a terrible idea.

Trump has said that he won’t sign any other legislation until the SAVE Act reaches his desk and is threatening to campaign against any Republicans who oppose the bill.

Senate Republicans seem to think that having a completely pointless debate is good for them politically. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer does not appear to agree. Via The New York Times:

“We are ready to be here all day, all night, as long as it takes to ensure the powers of voter suppression do not win the day,” said Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader. He estimated that the legislation could disenfranchise over 20 million American citizens.

House Republicans did their duty for Dear Leader when they passed the SAVE Act in February. As Fox 31 Denver reports, Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Ft. Lupton) is always on board with whatever President Trump demands:

“All it says is you have to show citizenship to register to vote, and you have to show some sort of ID when you actually cast your ballot,” Evans said…

…“All the SAVE Act does is clean up things like that, make sure that people have confidence that only American citizens are registering to vote and that they’re showing some sort of identification that proves that citizenship,” Evans said.

All it does is…make it harder for people to vote.

And all this blind support will do for Gabe Evans is add another talking point to the narrative that he is nothing but a Trump toadie.