“Johnson Offers Trump SAVE Act Consolation Prize”

Intelligencer on Speaker Johnson’s plan to use reconciliation to pass a version of the SAVE America Act: … House Speaker Mike Johnson is lobbying the White House and his congressional colleagues for a new, truncated version of the act that might comply with budget rules and should command the unanimous GOP support that could enable its passage in a budget-reconciliation bill… Instead of the SAVE America Act’s “stick” of mandatory voter-registration requirements, Johnson’s approach would offer the “carrot” of grant dollars for voluntary adopting the bill’s proof-of-citizenship scheme, as Punchbowl News now reports…. In the very improbable event Trump goes along with reducing his guns-blazing attack on blue-state voting practices to a grant program that only red states are likely to find attractive, Johnson’s bait-and-switch plan would face many other obstacles. The original impetus for a third budget-reconciliation bill in this Congress was to massively increase defense spending, beyond the levels any Democrat could support, as well as to offset cuts in social services spending rationalized as an assault on “fraud.” This is far from a noncontroversial proposition among Republicans facing voters in November, and there are countless intraparty differences over the size and direction of budget cuts that will compound the already-unpopular cuts contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Senate Majority Leader John Thune reportedly doesn’t want to do Reconciliation 3.0 at all. On top of everything else, budget-reconciliation bills are fiendishly complicated procedurally, and time, Punchbowl News observes, is running out….