Senate Republicans are letting the air out of House Republican efforts to pump up a partisan standoff over federal funding, which they fear could risk an embarrassing government shutdown a few weeks before Election Day.
With the prospect of a Senate Republican majority in 2025 tantalizingly close, GOP senators don’t want to let a proposal backed by former President Trump to require proof of citizenship for voter registration derail an end-of-month funding deal.
GOP senators acknowledge that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) won’t accept any short-term funding bill that would place new restrictions on voter registration and warn that Republicans would get the blame for any government shutdown caused by a fight over it.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is trying to decide whether to bring a government funding measure combined with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would establish new voter registration rules, to the floor next week. He suffered a setback Wednesday when he was forced to cancel a vote on the package amid divisions within his own conference over the continuing resolution’s (CR) six-month time frame.
But Republican senators are quietly rooting for House Republicans to drop the fight over voter registration and instead support a clean continuing resolution — without any policy riders — so Congress can wrap up its work and leave town without any drama in two weeks.
“It’s probably a good time to get the government operating effectively and not have [a shutdown] occur right before an election,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said.
Romney said the goal of the SAVE Act, to ensure only American citizens are registering to vote, is worth pursuing but suggested it would be more appropriate to push next year.
He said enacting it next year or in early 2026 would “give time for election officials to go through the process of actually looking at people’s documentation.”
“In the time frame we’re dealing with, it’s just not practical” before the November election, Romney said.
The Utah senator warned Republicans “always” get blamed for government shutdowns.
A Senate Republican aide said there’s no appetite among Republican senators to get into a standoff with Democrats over voter registration reform right before government funding is due to expire on Sept. 30.
“No one wants to back ourselves into a corner where it’s either the SAVE Act or shut down the government. It’s 50 days before the election, we’re not stupid,” the aide said.
But Trump is pouring fuel on the controversy by demanding that GOP lawmakers enact proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration or shut down Washington.
“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” Trump thundered in a Truth Social post Tuesday.
Trump has significantly more influence with House Republicans than he does with Senate Republicans, and his decision to interject himself in the debate has put the Speaker in a tough spot.
Johnson wants to win another term as Speaker and he can’t afford to anger Trump or his MAGA allies on Capitol Hill by capitulating too easily on the SAVE Act. But he also doesn’t want to be seen as shutting down the government with his narrow House majority on the line.
“Mike Johnson has to fight now so he can be re-elected Speaker,” the Senate GOP aide observed.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said his Senate GOP colleagues don’t want to let themselves get painted into a corner where they’re threatening a government shutdown on Sept. 28 or 29 if Democrats don’t agree to tighten voter registration requirements.
“We’re not going to shut down the government,” he said, adding that Republicans have a good set of issues to campaign on over the next several weeks: the economy, inflation and immigration and border security.
He suggested that some House conservatives would want to rev up their party’s right wing base with a losing battle over voter registration reform instead of sticking to meat-and-potatoes policy issues.
“There are some people that would rather lose gloriously than win humbly,” he said.
While the fight over voter registration rules has caught the attention of Trump and conservative pundits and activists, some Republican lawmakers see a bigger fight within the Capitol over whether to punt spending decisions into next year.
A growing number of GOP senators are also questioning Johnson’s plan to pass a stopgap measure that would essentially freeze federal programs and funding levels until late March 2025.
Senate Republicans warn that it would hurt the Pentagon and create a backlog of legislative work during the first few months of a Trump presidency — assuming that Trump wins.
“It’s a mistake to have a CR that goes beyond December because regardless of who wins the presidential election, we should be presenting them with a clean slate. They should not have the burden of dealing with issues of a fiscal year that began in October,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Collins said the SAVE Act shouldn’t be controversial, since noncitizens are already prohibited by law from voting but acknowledged that Democrats strongly oppose it.
As a growing number of GOP senators believe Johnson will be forced to drop the SAVE Act from the government funding bill, they are becoming more focused on whether it will extend until December or January, an issue that has also become a key sticking point among House Republicans.
“I’m more focused on the length of the CR and I’m very concerned that it not go beyond December,” Collins said.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said he also wants to revisit the spending bills during the lame-duck session in December instead of pushing them into March.
“My preference is that it goes until December. Let’s figure how the Nov. 5 election goes,” he said. “What I’d really hate to do is put Trump into office and then he has to [spend] the first three months dealing with a mess that’s hung over from the Biden administration. I’d prefer to get to a situation where the slate is clean.”
Mullin also offered the reality check that only a clean government funding stopgap is likely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“Obviously the House isn’t going to be able to send anything over here they want to, with the SAVE Act,” he said. “If they try to do something without a clean CR, it’s going to have a hard time passing.”