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Some conservatives are encouraging President Donald Trump to take executive action on elections, following reports the White House is weighing an order to exert more presidential power over voting.
Republicans like Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., see such action as a way for Trump to impose pieces of the SAVE America Act, a GOP-sponsored voter ID bill.
“If he has the power to make sure that people have to be citizens to be registered to vote, show ID to vote, he ought to do it,” Scott told Semafor. “If he has the power to do the things that SAVE America does, I think it’s great.”
But there’s a counterpoint to any effort to federalize elections: “They’re run by the states. So I don’t know how he would do it,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., a former governor.
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune said the Senate GOP is not united on forcing Democrats to commit to a talking filibuster to pass the voter ID bill. In a statement for this story, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump wants Congress to pass bills enacting a photo ID standard, curtail mail-in voting, and stop the practice of so-called ballot harvesting.
“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Jackson said. “The vast majority of Americans support President Trump’s commonsense election integrity agenda. Democrat politicians should too.”
But the deadlock in the Senate around the SAVE bill has even the proposal’s critics thinking that Trump may decide to end-around Congress at this point.
“This is how they have kind of worked to advance some of their priorities, they’re certainly not being shy in utilizing that,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who opposes both the bill and “anything that is going to erode protections of the filibuster.”
Murkowski said that includes the talking filibuster strategy. But the bill’s chief proponent, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, isn’t giving up yet: “Separate and apart from whatever the president might be able to do through executive action, we still need the legislation.”
“Nobody has made the argument that the strategy doesn’t work under the rules. The argument that’s being made has been that we’re a few votes shy,” Lee told Semafor. If “it’s a matter of lacking numbers, then let’s work in that direction.”
According to The Washington Post, Trump allies are circulating a draft of an executive order that would declare a national emergency due to alleged Chinese election interference in 2020 in order to exert more federal control over elections. Trump said last week that he’s not considering declaring a national emergency to take executive action.