The most consequential election bill in a generation was written by a senator from Utah. The president named it in his State of the Union address and has said he will sign nothing else until it reaches his desk.
The SAVE Act has failed in the Senate three times this year, in a chamber Republicans control.
The obstacle is the filibuster. Trump wants it gone. So does Sen. Mike Lee, who wrote the bill. On Thursday, Utah's other senator published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the headline I Won't Change the Filibuster. "Under no circumstance will I support any effort to end or alter the filibuster," Sen. John Curtis wrote.
Curtis is a co-sponsor of the bill. He voted for its substance in June, when it came up as an amendment to a homeland security funding package. Asked by Utahn whether he would vote yes on final passage of the House-passed text, his office said yes. He wants the bill to become law. He will not vote for the only way it can get there.
Utah sends six Republicans to Congress. Five of them are willing to pay almost any price to pass this bill. Curtis has named a price he won't pay, and it happens to be the one that matters.
What the bill says
Chip Roy of Texas introduced the first version in 2024. It passed the House and died in a Democratic Senate. He reintroduced it in 2025 as H.R. 22, and it passed the House again that April, 220-208. Lee filed the Senate companion, S. 128, which nearly every Senate Republican co-sponsored. It never got a vote.
In January, Roy and Lee introduced an expanded version called the SAVE America Act. It kept the proof-of-citizenship requirement for registration and added a nationwide photo ID requirement for voting.
On February 11, House leadership took S. 1383, a minor Senate-passed bill on a veterans advisory committee, emptied it, and inserted the SAVE America Act in its place, a standard maneuver for getting a bill onto the Senate calendar without waiting for the Senate.
It went to the floor under a closed rule, with no markup in the committee that has jurisdiction over federal election law, and passed 218-213. The 32-page text is public, as is the bill as printed in the Congressional Record that day.
The bill has two operative sections.
The first amends the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. No state may accept an application to register for a federal election unless the applicant presents documentary proof of citizenship along with it, under any method of registration.
The bill lists what qualifies: a REAL ID that indicates citizenship, a U.S. passport, a military ID paired with a service record showing a U.S. birthplace, a government photo ID showing a U.S. birthplace, or a government photo ID presented together with a certified birth certificate, a hospital birth record, an adoption decree, a Consular Report of Birth Abroad, a naturalization certificate, or an American Indian Card.
A standard REAL ID driver's license does not indicate citizenship. For most Americans, satisfying the requirement means producing a passport or a birth certificate. And because the document must accompany the application, anyone registering by mail must present it in person to their election official by the state deadline. In practice, that ends online and mail registration as those systems work today.
The bill anticipates two objections. If the name on the document does not match the applicant's name, the common situation for women who have married, the state must still process the application when the applicant provides supporting documentation or signs an affidavit attesting the document bears a previous name.
If an applicant has no qualifying document at all, the state must create a process under which the applicant signs an attestation under penalty of perjury and submits other evidence, and a local official decides whether citizenship has been established.
Lee has defended this fallback in plain terms: it covers people who can't find their birth certificate, "maybe their house burned down, maybe their dog ate it, whatever it is."
Every state must also submit its complete voter list to the Department of Homeland Security for screening through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, which is, confusingly, also abbreviated SAVE. Where the screening identifies a noncitizen, DHS must investigate whether to open removal proceedings.
Two enforcement provisions deserve attention. The bill creates a private right of action against any election official who registers someone without proof of citizenship. It also makes doing so a federal crime. Utah has 29 county clerks who would carry that exposure personally.
The second section adds a photo ID requirement to the Help America Vote Act. In-person voters must present a physical photo ID. Absentee voters must submit a copy of one, or the last four digits of their Social Security number with an affidavit that they could not obtain a copy. Student IDs are excluded. Deployed service members are exempt. A voter without ID casts a provisional ballot and has three days to cure it. Photo ID applies to elections in 2027 and after. The registration requirements take effect on enactment.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal, but federal law requires registrants to affirm citizenship under penalty of perjury rather than prove it. Lee and Roy argue that an affirmation is not verification, and that verification is routine everywhere else in American life.
"The SAVE America Act provides multiple ways to prove citizenship, as millions of Americans do every day for work, travel, and financial transactions," Lee told the Deseret News in February.
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican and Utah's chief election officer, spent more than a year cross-referencing 2,069,640 voter records against driver's license data and the same federal SAVE database the bill would mandate. Her office confirmed 99.72 percent of registered Utah voters as citizens and found 27 confirmed noncitizens, all since removed.
Its January preliminary findings reported no evidence that a noncitizen had cast a ballot. It also identified 5,007 eligible registrants, mostly longtime voters and data-entry errors, who now have paperwork to sort out under the state's new citizenship law.
The delegation
Utah's four House members, Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy and Burgess Owens, support the SAVE Act. Every Republican who cast a vote backed the bill on February 11, and when House leadership attached it to the defense authorization bill in July to force it across the Capitol, all four voted for the package.
Moore, who sits in House Republican leadership, registered the delegation's one caution, and it was about tactics. "We can't be the party that starts doing a bunch of multiple-issue bills," he said in March, "leveraging this to get this."
Two ways to kill a filibuster, and why they're not the same
The filibuster is not in the Constitution, and it is not exactly a rule. It is the consequence of a missing one. In 1806, the Senate discarded the motion the House still uses to force a vote and never replaced it. For the next 111 years, debate ended when senators stopped talking. Rule XXII, adopted in 1917, created cloture, a vote to close debate, at a two-thirds threshold.
In 1975, the Senate lowered it to 60 votes. Cloture became the default. The modern Senate rarely debates a contested bill to exhaustion; it counts to 60 and moves on if it gets there.
Abolishing the filibuster means eliminating that threshold. Amending Rule XXII directly takes 67 votes, so nobody tries. The live route is the nuclear option: the majority leader raises a point of order that cloture requires only a simple majority, the chair rules against him, and 51 senators vote to overturn the chair. That vote sets a precedent, and precedent binds the Senate as firmly as its written rules.
Democrats went nuclear on most nominations in 2013. Republicans extended it to the Supreme Court in 2017. No party has done it for legislation. It is what Trump demands, and what Lee endorsed this week: "We should nuke the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act."
A talking filibuster changes no rule and sets no precedent. The majority declines to file cloture and declines to yield. The minority must hold the floor by speaking continuously in person. When no senator seeks recognition, the chair puts the question, and a simple majority passes the bill. Its advocates call it the original arrangement, the way the Senate ran for a century before cloture existed. Roy demanded it by name the day the House passed the bill: make Democrats stand up and defend their opposition out loud.
Majority Leader John Thune has warned a talking filibuster would consume weeks of floor time with a farm bill, a highway bill and Russia sanctions queued behind it, and would hand Democrats openings to force painful votes along the way. By March, he said he lacked the votes to start one or sustain one. The record since bears him out. Cloture failed 53-47 in March.
In April, a John Kennedy amendment to fold the bill's core provisions into a filibuster-proof reconciliation package failed 48-50, with Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitch McConnell and Thom Tillis joining every Democrat. In June, Lindsey Graham tried the same maneuver on an immigration funding bill and failed 48-50 again, with the same four Republicans opposed and both Utah senators voting yes.
"It's about the votes. It's about the math," Thune told reporters.
The argument
Curtis rejects the distinction between the two methods. "To me, that's no different than ending the filibuster," he told the Washington Examiner in February. "So, it's a nonstarter for me."
Lee's case is textual. The 60-vote threshold lives in Rule XXII, and a talking filibuster leaves Rule XXII untouched. Nothing is amended, and no precedent is broken. The minority keeps every tool it has ever had, including the ability to talk as long as it can physically manage. What it loses is the ability to block a bill without effort, by filing an objection and going home. The modern filibuster, in Lee's telling, is not the institution's design. It is a convenience that grew up around cloture, and a talking filibuster restores something rather than destroying it.
Curtis's case is functional. He is not arguing about which rule is on the books but about what a senator can do. Today a determined minority can stop a bill it considers too partisan, and that capacity is what gives individual members leverage, including against their own leadership. Under a talking filibuster, the majority wins by outlasting, and outlasting is arithmetic. 53 beats 47 eventually.
In the Journal, Curtis pushed the point past party: the minority "isn't just a party. It can be any senator, on any issue, at any time." A rule that survives on paper while producing majority-rule outcomes has not survived in any sense he cares about.
Lee has an answer: a talking filibuster is so costly in time and stamina that it would almost never be used, preserving the 60-vote norm for ordinary business and reserving majority passage for the rare bill a majority will bleed for. Thune's floor-time warning is evidence for that view. It also cuts against it. A tool that expensive is a tool the majority will want to make cheaper, and majorities make procedural tools cheaper by using them.
Four years
The Senate ran this exact experiment in January 2022, with the parties reversed. Chuck Schumer proposed a one-time talking-filibuster carve-out to pass two Democratic voting bills. Same mechanism Lee wants now, same subject matter. It failed 48-52 when Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema joined all 50 Republicans.
On January 12 of that year, Mike Lee went to the floor to argue against it. His speech, The Filibuster: Protecting America from Bad Law, called the 60-vote requirement "one of the most powerful restraints or checks on human nature" in the federal government. He described it as the keel of a large ship, a stabilizer that keeps the country from lurching between extremes with each election. Without it, he said, tax rates, the criminal code and the size of the Supreme Court could swing wildly every few years. He quoted Schumer's own past words back at him, that attempts to remove the filibuster are "what we call abuse of power," and added his own gloss: breaking the rules to grab power is an abuse. He closed by warning Democrats that the American people would see through the ploy.
He held that position through the 2024 campaign. That October, Lee posted a doomsday timeline of what a Democratic sweep would bring. It began "Day 1: Nuke the filibuster" and ended with Democrats ruling America uncontested for a century. Day 4 of his scenario was a federal takeover of elections.
Then four things happened, in order.
His party won everything. Republicans won the White House and both chambers of Congress in November 2024, and the 60-vote threshold changed sides. The tool that had protected Lee's minority became the thing blocking his majority.
Trump started demanding it. During the 43-day government shutdown last fall, the president called on Senate Republicans to go nuclear, and kept calling, near-monthly. Curtis answered within a day, in October: "I'm a firm no on eliminating it." Lee gave no such answer. The Washington Examiner reported that as recently as last year Lee was publicly on the fence.
His diagnosis of the Senate shifted. By December, Lee was arguing that the problem was not the filibuster but "cloture abuse," a "perpetual tail-chasing model" in which Republicans control everything and pass nothing. Six weeks later, he introduced the SAVE America Act, and within days he was working with the White House and Senate leadership to revive the talking filibuster. "We've grown so accustomed to cloture that we've forgotten that it's not the only tool in the shed," he said, stressing that the approach would change no rules permanently.
The talking filibuster failed to materialize, and his language escalated. In April, at the state GOP convention in Orem, he told delegates the filibuster should end if the Senate would not force Democrats to oppose his bill in person. By July, it was "We should nuke the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act," with the talking filibuster demoted to a fallback.
Lee has a consistency argument, and its strongest version comes from his own 2022 speech. He said then that the only sense in which the Senate was broken was "its neglect of substantive debate and amendment."
A talking filibuster forces debate. Read charitably, his February position was that the 2022 sentence turned into strategy, and it avoided the thing he had condemned Schumer for: a rules change by simple majority. The argument holds exactly as far as the talking filibuster and no further. Nuking the filibuster is a formal precedent change adopted by simple majority. It is the specific act his 2022 speech named an abuse of power, proposed for the same category of legislation, with only the party reversed.
What changed in four years is not Lee's theory of the Senate. It is which side of the 60-vote line his priorities sit on. That is not a unique failing, and Democrats have run the same reversal in both directions. In August 2024, expecting a Harris win, Schumer counted the votes out loud for piercing the filibuster to pass voting rights bills: "We got it up to 48, but, of course, Sinema and Manchin voted no; that's why we couldn't change the rules. Well, they're both gone. Ruben Gallego is for it, and we have 51."
Weakening the rule had become a litmus test for that year's Democratic Senate candidates. Then Democrats lost, and the positions inverted. Gallego, who campaigned on abolition, spent 2025 telling town halls that Senate Democrats have "used the filibuster whenever we can" against the Trump agenda. Schumer, who proposed the 2022 carve-out, is now the man wielding the 60-vote threshold to kill Lee's bill. No Democratic leader has renewed the 2024 pledge while in the minority, but none has renounced it either, and Trump's claim that Democrats "will do it on day one" is a taunt built on Schumer's own arithmetic.
The filibuster's oldest pattern is that nearly everyone's principles about it track their vote count. Curtis's op-ed makes one claim to distinction, which is that his position does not: "Power changes hands, but principles shouldn't," he wrote in October, when the bill being blocked was his own party's. The record on both sides of the aisle suggests how rare that is. Asked by Utahn whether the commitment holds under a Democratic majority, his office did not hedge: his views on the filibuster "are longstanding and are not tied to any specific legislation," and he "would stand firm on the filibuster in any instance under any majority." That answer is now on the record. The next majority, whichever party holds it, will collect on it.f
August
Congress is scheduled to leave town. Trump says it shouldn't. Lee is leading an effort to cancel the recess until the bill passes. Thune has said that staying in Washington does not change the math.
If the bill dies this Congress, it will not be because 47 Democrats stopped it. Forty-seven senators cannot stop anything alone. It will be because a handful of Republicans decided the 60-vote threshold was worth more than the bill their president made his top legislative priority, and refused to break the Senate to pass it.
Curtis spent seven years in the House, where he says he never had a single meaningful opportunity to influence major legislation. He has been a senator for 19 months. The thing he is defending is the thing that made the difference, and he is defending it against the man who sits next to him.
Utahn has reached out to both Sen. Lee and Sen. Curtis
We asked Sen. Lee's office the following three questions:
- Sen. Curtis says a talking filibuster is "no different than ending the filibuster" because the outcome is majority passage either way. What's the senator's response to that specific argument?
- His 2022 speech called breaking the rules by simple majority "an abuse of power." The nuclear option is a precedent change by simple majority. What distinguishes what he's now calling for from what he condemned then, beyond which party benefits?
- In October 2024, he warned that Democrats would "nuke the filibuster" on day one and rule uncontested. If Republicans nuke it first for the SAVE America Act, what stops the scenario he described, with the parties reversed?
We asked Sen. Curtis's office the following three questions:
- If the SAVE America Act reached a final passage vote at the 60-vote threshold, would Sen. Curtis vote yes on the bill as passed by the House on Feb. 11 (the S. 1383 text)?
- He co-sponsored S. 128 last Congress. Has he co-sponsored S. 3752, the expanded version? If not, is there a provision in the new text that gives him pause?
- His op-ed says "power changes hands, but principles shouldn't." If Democrats retake the majority and attempt the 2022-style carve-out again, will he commit now to the same "under no circumstance" opposition being applied by his colleagues to their side?
Sen. John Curtis's office sent the following to Utahn in response to the above questions:
1. Yes. In fact, Senator Curtis has voted in favor of the bill before when it was offered as an amendment to a DHS funding package. That vote failed. See here: https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1192/vote_119_2_00144.htm
2. He is a cosponsor of the SAVE America Act. See here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/3752/cosponsors
3. His views on the filibuster are longstanding and are not tied to any specific legislation. He would stand firm on the filibuster in any instance under any majority.
Sen. Lee's answers will be added to this article if and when we get a response.
Article edited by Clint Betts. What are we missing? What did this piece get wrong? Email the editor at clint@utahn.com.
