House passes SAVE America Act anti-voting measures in budget reconciliation, stock trading bills

President Donald Trump took a step closer to slaying his white whale Wednesday and enacting the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter suppression measure that the Senate has repeatedly refused to pass.

The House voted 216-214 on a budget reconciliation framework that includes $10 billion worth of election-related grants over a 10-year period for coaxing states into adopting anti-voting measures like those in Trump’s pet proposal. The $95 billion package also includes funding for the Iran war and bailouts for farmers hurt by Trump’s tariffs.

It’s still unclear what will be in the final reconciliation bill; now that the budget resolution has been approved, individual House committees will go about drafting the legislation. The reconciliation process allows Senate Republicans to bypass the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold and pass legislation with a simple majority.

Separately, the House passed a ban on members of Congress trading stocks that also included a provision requiring voters to provide photo identification in order to cast a ballot — though Democrats broadly viewed the bill as a partisan messaging stunt.  

Despite Republican control of the Senate, it is unlikely that Trump will see any version of SAVE enacted ahead of the midterms.

Legislation passed through reconciliation must be budgetary in nature. The Senate parliamentarian, the chamber’s procedural umpire, ruled last month that the SAVE America provisions did not fit the bill, leading Trump to call for her ouster. 

Even if these new, still-unknown provisions aren’t removed procedurally, the last time the Senate voted on the SAVE America Act, four Republicans voted against it, meaning it failed to receive even a majority’s support.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has also downplayed the proposal’s chances amid legislative strategy differences with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). While the House passed a short-term stopgap funding bill Tuesday to avoid a government shutdown when the current fiscal year ends Sept. 30, Thune prefers a different spending package that he hopes to strongarm Democrats into supporting by threatening to use reconciliation if they don’t. 

Johnson’s whip team had to overcome some last-minute opposition from within their own party to enact the budget resolution, with some conservatives objecting to the framework’s lack of offsetting cuts to pay for the spending. 

Time waits for no man… or politician

Still, time is running out for Republicans. Without a stopgap funding bill in place by the end of September, the federal government would shut down, and the party in charge of both chambers of Congress and the White House could expect the lion’s share of the blame. 

Meanwhile, the ongoing — and unauthorized — Iran war heaps on the pressure. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testified Tuesday that the war has cost $37.5 billion thus far and warned that the Pentagon’s treasury was running low, threatening the military’s ability to replenish its arsenal.

And the summer recess compounds the time crunch exponentially. The House is scheduled to leave Washington Thursday and won’t return until the last day in August, while the Senate plans to leave town Aug. 7 and come back Sept. 14. 

That will leave precious few legislative days to finalize whatever plan Capitol Hill Republicans land on, as Congress will again leave in October to campaign ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections. 

The Stop (Democrats from voting against) Insider Trading Act 

The House also passed a bill designed to jam Democrats. The Stop Insider Trading Act would prevent members of Congress and their families from buying individual stocks — a proposal extremely popular with Democrats and voters in general. But Republicans attached a voter ID provision to the bill ahead of the floor vote. 

“Republicans cannot credibly present this legislation as a good-faith effort to end congressional stock trading,” Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) said in a press release. “Instead, this bill is a Trojan horse — using the premise of congressional ethics reform to advance a broader effort to restrict access to the ballot box.”

Democrats also attacked the bill’s stock trading limitations as riddled with loopholes — it lets lawmakers keep individual stocks they already own, allowing them to vote in those companies’ favor — and insufficiently comprehensive, favoring instead proposals that would extend the ban to the President and Vice President. 

In the end, the bill passed 232-198, with 13 Democrats joining Republicans in support.

The bill has dim prospects in the Senate, however. While Senate committees have advanced their own, stronger bipartisan anti-insider trading proposal, leadership has let it languish without a floor vote.