Mike Johnson said this week that the House does not have the votes to move forward with Donald Trump’s demanded crackdown on mailed ballots in the Save America Act, putting the GOP push on the bill’s most contested election change on hold. Johnson said he would keep working with the votes he has, but the broader version Trump wants is still not ready for the floor.
The timing matters because Trump has made the Save America Act his No. 1 priority in Congress and, this week, told reporters in the Oval Office that the “no mail ballots” provision was “maybe the most important of all, because it’s so corrupt.” He said he was willing to allow “strong exceptions” for military members and a few other limited cases, but he insisted the mail voting language must stay in the bill.
Johnson and other House leaders have kept to an older version of the SAVE America Act that focuses on proof-of-citizenship requirements while otherwise leaving states to run their elections as they see fit. That earlier House version, which narrowly passed in February, does not include the broader package Trump wants now. The latest version has never passed the House.
The split is bigger than one line over mailed ballots. Trump’s preferred version also includes a blanket prohibition on transgender people playing women’s sports and a ban on gender-affirming surgeries for minors. The older House approach stops at citizenship checks, which is why Johnson’s comments amount to a clear admission that Republicans do not yet have support for the full rewrite.
That reluctance is not hard to understand. Many Republicans are privately aware that lawmakers in close races rely on mailed ballots themselves, and Johnson has already described the matter as difficult to regulate nationally because states handle it differently. He said, in effect, that he will move only with the count he has, not the one Trump wants.
The Supreme Court last week added more pressure when it struck down Trump’s attempt to regulate mail voting by executive order, including his effort to restrict counting ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving afterward. Rep. Mark Amodei said he was “happy” about that ruling and argued that absentee ballots are not a bad thing historically if they come with structure. “Listen, absentee ballots are not a bad thing historically as long as you put some kind of structure on it,” he said, adding, “Just have some commonsensical safeguards for when it has to be postmarked by.”
Amodei went further, saying, “It says mail-in voting in and of itself is not evil. … There ought to be some mechanism for you to do that.” His view reflects the fault line inside the GOP effort: many Republicans want tighter rules, but not a federal ban that upends systems states already use.
Rep. Julie Fedorchak remains an outspoken supporter of the SAVE America Act, and she has introduced a bill that could let Republicans fold pieces of the elections overhaul into a party-line budget reconciliation bill. But Johnson’s vote count suggests the Trump-backed mail crackdown is still the hurdle that matters most, and unless that changes, the House is likely to keep advancing only the narrower citizenship-focused version.
