If GOP Fails on SAVE America Act, Brandon Gill Explains What Democrats Will Do Long-Term

The following is a preview of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, on “The Signal Sitdown.” The full interview premieres on The Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. EST on March 26.

Congress could be heading for another One Big Beautiful Bill.

Congressional Republicans are facing a double-bind of a lingering shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security and the urgent need to pass the SAVE America Act, an election integrity bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote and implement nationwide voter ID, before November’s midterm elections.

Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss where the rapidly-evolving GOP strategy to end the shutdown and secure American elections is heading.

The Republican plan to address these key issues has gone through several iterations just this week. On Sunday, President Donald Trump suggested that Republicans should not negotiate with Democrats on reopening the Department of Homeland Security until he signed the SAVE America Act into law.

By Monday, the president said DHS funding and the SAVE America Act should be coupled together. That evening, after a meeting with several Republican senators, Republican messaging shifted to reopening DHS in short order and passing the SAVE America Act through budget reconciliation.

Gill is one of several House Republicans to refuse to pass bills received from the Senate in the House until the SAVE America Act is signed into law.

“This is the number one most important piece of legislation we could be working on right now,” Gill told The Daily Signal of the SAVE America Act.

“We need election integrity,” Gill explained, because “every time an illegal alien votes in our election system, it disenfranchises an American citizen by canceling out their vote.”

“What we want to ensure is only the people who are citizens are voting,” Gill continued. “That is particularly important right now after four years of open borders under the Biden administration.”

Though voter ID and other SAVE America Act provisions regularly poll with approval ratings of over 70%, Gill believes Democrats will never budge on the issue because it does not comport with the Left’s long-term political strategy.

”Whenever you back up a little bit, and you look at what the Left’s overall political agenda is, it has been to flood the country with as many illegal aliens as they possibly can, and they have done that systematically because it benefits them electorally,” Gill claimed.

“What they would like to see, I think, ideally, is create a system where illegal aliens can vote in American elections and can vote en masse without any ability to check,” Gill said.

Given the urgent need for election integrity, the Senate has been facing pressure to pass the SAVE America Act using the talking filibuster, a mechanism that would have allowed the upper chamber to pass the bill while circumventing the 60 vote cloture threshold. While the Senate has engaged in a long-term debate over the bill, Senate Republican leadership has rebuffed requests for a talking filibuster effort.

But because the SAVE America Act stands no chance of passing the filibuster, the Senate is now pushing for a budget reconciliation process to pass the SAVE America Act or some version of it. Apparently, this effort has the support of the Trump administration.

“There’s a framework that we can do through reconciliation, paying for, putting some of the policies that cost money in, because there’s nothing more important than the SAVE America Act,” Mullin told The Daily Signal at the White House on Tuesday.

Gill and many others on the Hill, however, are skeptical that the budget reconciliation process will lead to any meaningful election integrity measures because they might be stripped out by the Senate parliamentarian, who could rule these policies are not germane to the budget.

“If that is possible, I’m all for it,” Gill said of a reconciliation bill with SAVE America attached. “But I have not heard a single person make a cogent case that Save America Act is Byrd-able, that that will pass muster in the Senate.”

 “If it is, great, but I do not think that we should be getting our voters and the American people’s hopes up that that’s going to work,” Gill added.

”The purpose of all of this is not to message, it’s not to put Democrats on record, being against voter ID. They’re already against all of that,” Gill said. “It’s to get this on the president’s desk. And, candidly, I don’t think reconciliation is the way to do that.”

“If it were, we likely would’ve done it in the first reconciliation bill, but we didn’t,” the Texas congressman said. “I think we need to go back to the, uh, to the talking filibuster and get it done.”

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