What if I told you Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has the power and the votes — right now — to save Republicans’ congressional majorities, President Trump’s second-term agenda, and maybe the republic itself, all while poleaxing Democrats on the short side of an 84-15 issue?
It sounds like fantasy. But like the Lady of the Lake from Arthurian legend, 2026 is offering up to the GOP a political weapon almost as powerful as Excalibur itself: an extended Democrat talking filibuster of national voter ID legislation.
Popular Idea, Toxic Opposition
Requiring voters to prove their citizenship is one of the most popular ideas in the country, with 84 percent of Americans supporting and only 15 percent opposed. That’s why 36 states and most of the world’s developed countries already have it on the books.
To most Americans, the only thing suspicious about voter ID is why anyone would oppose it. Surely no one wants noncitizens voting, right? Right?
Actually, Democrat leaders, donors, and activists very much want noncitizens voting. Elected Democrats are perfectly aware that the party machine registers ineligible voters and harvests their ballots as a matter of course. They also know that their woke base believes voter ID laws are pure evil, part of Donald Trump’s neo-fascist conspirazzzzzzzzzzz…
Conventional political wisdom, therefore, dismisses voter ID as a legislative nonstarter. Sure, Republicans could pass a bill like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act through the House of Representatives, as they did last April. But Senate Democrats would filibuster it, denying the GOP the 60 votes they’d need to end debate and pass the bill.
But hold on a second.
Why would Republicans want to end an around-the-clock, nationally televised circus where Democrat senators defy 84 percent of the country — and about 70 percent of Democrats! — to defend illegal immigrant voter fraud in the middle of an election year?
Usually, party unity is a political asset. In the case of Democrat activists and elites’ opposition to voter ID, it’s a toxic asset, like the subprime mortgage derivatives that bankrupted Wall Street in 2008. Democrats can’t politically profit off their extremist ideological commitment against voter ID, but they also can’t unload it.
A Senate debate on the SAVE Act would fork Democrats between a country they can’t persuade and a base they can’t defy.