Is Trump's SAVE America F*ck America Bill To Ban Voting And Transgender Mutilizations Dead In The Senate? Or ...
Yes, we said 'mutilizations' because Dear Leader says 'mutilizations,' it's the hottest word now, mutilizations.
All week, Donald Trump has been dementia babbling that he’s going to shut down the government over the SAVE Act, that he won’t sign any more legislation until it’s passed. Not only that, but Trump says the Senate shouldn’t just pass the current SAVE Act as passed by the House, the one where people have to prove they’re citizens and show ID to vote, and women have to ask their husbands’ permission to cast a ballot and risk having their index fingers sliced off if they try any funny business like voting for a Democrat. (Is that not in the text? Oh well, it’s implied.) Trump instead wants Republicans to “GO FOR THE GOLD” and ban mail-in ballots and ban men from women’s sports and “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION FOR CHILDREN.”
Yes, he actually typed “mutilization,” because he is an illiterate buffoon, or whichever intern typed this post wrote it that way to match all his verbal diarrhea this week.
Basically it’s every MAGA wet dream about making voting as difficult as possible for those who treasonously might not want to give Supreme Leader supreme power. Of course, they’re pushing it as “protecting” voting, to serve Trump’s paranoid delusions about his 2020 election loss, and because fascists always mean the opposite of what they say, and every word out of these bastards’ mouth is a confession to some crime or another.
The truth is, passing a bill to destroy voting rights in the US would probably be Trump’s only chance to salvage the midterms for his Nazi party. And he knows it.
“It will guarantee the midterms,” Trump has said. “If you don’t get it, big trouble, my opinion.”
As of today, that bill is dead in the Senate. Mean old Senate Majority Leader John Thune says it “doesn’t have the votes.”
And MAGA is furious.
You see, Thune has been using woke math to insist that there simply aren’t Republican votes to blow up the filibuster and pass the bill to SAVE America from democracy. Mike Lee, one of the top five lunatics in the Senate, and the bill’s main Senate sponsor, is fundraising hard over the fantastical belief that they totally can. A truly dumb bitch, Lee thinks America will be on his side as soon as he exposes all the “non-citizen voting” that’s happening. (Non-citizen voting pretty much never actually happens, but talking about it makes mom-and-pop white supremacists shit the bed at night, and again, it’s good for fundraising.)
All the real hardcore anti-voting, anti-American white Karens like Cleta Mitchell are rousing the rabble along with Lee to pressure Republicans to walk this plank.
Ah yes, the “talking filibuster,” the magic bullet these dipshits think would get this bill passed. The Heritage Foundation is blowing false hope up its moron followers’ asses about it. The general idea is that they should force Democrats into really for truly filibustering this freedom-fucking bill, and that then they’d buckle, for sure! Having outlasted the Democrats’ energy, the Republicans could then invoke cloture and then pass the FUCK America Act with a simple majority.
But yes, Mike Lee’s biggest mouthbreathers, they’re breathing all over Thune and other Republicans right now. And a lot of Republican senators are fucking sick of it:
“Spare me the insights,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is retiring. “They’re worse than Democrats because they’re so-called Republicans that are trying to undermine Republicans.”
Another GOP senator, granted anonymity to speak candidly, described the online rhetoric as “bullshit.” A third senator, granted anonymity for similar reasons, summed up the feeling within the conference: “A lot of us are done.”
Thune himself is reportedly privately super-annoyed. (And he did indeed accuse the people attacking all the Republican senators right now of being part of a “paid influencer ecosystem.” Hence fascism-for-hire activist Cleta Mitchell’s comment up there, and also Mike Lee’s public bitching that people are suggesting such things.)
REMEMBER CLETA.
A-Hole Trump Coup Lawyer Sick Of Gross Youngs Voting, What If We Just Made That Totally Impossible?
Yesterday, Thune announced that, the realest morons in his caucus be damned, he’s bringing the bill to the floor next week. That his caucus doesn’t have the support to try to out-babble Democrats on this. He’s warning that Democrats could literally tie up the Senate’s business with this until after the midterms. And he’s got other ways he wants to fuck America between now and then, like confirming a bunch of Trump’s nominees like Markwayne Mullin to be the new Yosemite Sam The Plumber in charge of ICE, and funding DHS, and other stuff too!
“We don’t have the votes, either to proceed [to] a talking filibuster nor to sustain one if we got on one,” Thune said at a leadership press conference Tuesday. “That’s just a function of math. There isn’t anything I can do about that.”
Does Donald Trump understand this? Uhhh.
“We’ve conveyed that to him. It’s important for everybody to understand this is about the votes, it’s about the math,” Thune said. “For better or for worse, I’m the one who has to be the clear-eyed realist here.”
“We’re gonna have the fight on the floor. We’re going to vote on this.”
It’s a messaging bill, he says. (That means it’s going to lose, but members can use it for messaging.)
As Democracy Docket notes, Thune has been trying to find a time in history when a bill actually still got through after a talking filibuster. “In all other cases since the practice began, including the famous 60-day filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, cloture was inevitably invoked before voting for passage,” Democracy Docket explains.
But what about Trump over here, saying he won’t sign any legislation if they don’t pass the RAPE America Act, plus also tack on no mail-in ballots and the Riley Gaines Swimming Reparations Act and no transgender MUTILIZATION for everybody? At the House GOP retreat, Trump, clearly not understanding what goes into drafting a new bill, demanded Speaker Mike Johnson “draw a new one” (a new bill) that included all the anti-trans stuff and the mail-in ballot ban. Come on, Mike, it’s easy!
“I wanted to add two more to it because they’re, I say, 95 percent, maybe 100 percent,” Trump said, pointing to banning trans girls and women from sports that align with their gender identity and blocking what he has repeatedly referred to as “mutilization” of trans youth. “That should be the easiest thing to get passed that you’ve ever had. Each one, it’s ‘best of,’ best of Trump.”
The very best words, sir!
In response, Thune is like … WHAT?
“Those were all things that weren’t part of what they sent over here to us,” Thune told reporters Monday. “Whatever we take up here is an open question now, because the thing we have in front of us is the House message, so it would probably make sense for them to send over another version.”
And then he pulled all his hair out and quit the Senate to go smoke drugs and never see these idiots’ faces ever again, probably.
Caius Willingham, a senior policy analyst from Advocates for Trans Equality quoted in 19th News, notes that Senate Republicans don’t have the support for all that (weirdass) anti-trans stuff Trump wants, so it’s confusing why Trump thinks that would help this totally dead bill. “Putting those riders into the SAVE America Act would actually turn off more senators than it would inspire them,” says Willingham.
It also turns out other Republicans aren’t actually on board with Trump’s dementia-fied dipshit fixation on mail-in ballots, so that would also make it even harder to pass the dead bill:
“I don’t want the federal government telling me that I can’t have mail-in voting or absentee ballot voting,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters Monday.
It’s almost like some Republicans secretly know where votes actually come from.
Anything else to make this stupider?
Glad you asked!
Over in the House, Mike Johnson’s brightest shining lights have plans for how they’re going to force the Senate to do their bidding and pass this legislation. Lauren Bobert says maybe the House shouldn’t consider any Senate legislation until the Senate passes the bill. Anna Paulina Luna wants to put the SAVE Act into other must-pass legislation, like FISA reauthorization. You know, just stick it on there.
Senators of both parties love it when America’s most inbred congressmen tell them what to do, it is their favorite.
Anything ELSE to make this stupider?
Glad you asked!
Trump has been refusing to endorse anybody in the Texas Republican Senate primary, trying to bully John Cornyn into supporting this bill. Universally loathed Ken Paxton has been trying to bribe/troll Republican senators into passing it, saying he’ll drop out of the Republican primary runoff if they do.
And today, Cornyn buckled like a little weenus, abandoning all his principles to say he suddenly supports nuking the filibuster and passing the FUCK America Act.
“On these critical issues, at this critical hour, the old procedures no longer align with the core American principles we must defend,” he wrote. “ It is time for our Senate Republican Conference, led by our strong and strategic Majority Leader John Thune, to retake the initiative, rebuild momentum and get results.”
LOL sure whatever.
And what does John Thune have to say to that? EAT THIS HOLE, that’s what he says:
“Well, Sen. Cornyn is one of 53 Republican senators, and the opposition to nuking the filibuster runs very, very deep in our conference,” he said.
So the bill is still dead? But maybe Cornyn tricked Trump into endorsing him?
Time will tell, we reckon!
[Democracy Docket / Politico / 19th News / Politico]
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While Congress these days does little more than bicker like tweens, I think actual tweens might be more productive in doing stuff that Congress was supposed to be elected to do, and with more gravitas.
More performative, tax-wasting Republican bullshit.