Why J.D. Vance May Be the Last Man Standing Between the SAVE Act and a Filing Cabinet in the Basement
On August 8, 2026, the United States Senate held a cloture vote on a stripped-down version of the SAVE America Act. Senator Husted had trimmed it down to voter photo identification. Just that. Nothing else.
The vote was 52 to 46.
Sixty were required. The senators then got on airplanes and went home for five weeks. They do not return until September 14. By the time they walk back in, the calendar has been shaved so thin that most people covering this have already written the obituary. “Effectively dead” is the phrase making the rounds.
I want to walk you through something, because there is a theory circulating on this platform right now that Vice President J.D. Vance could fix this tomorrow if he simply had the spine to walk into the chamber and swing the gavel. And there is a counter-theory, pushed just as hard, that the Vice President is a potted plant in a nice suit who can do nothing but break ties and attend funerals.
Both camps are wrong. Not equally wrong, but wrong.
The truth is more interesting than either one, and it happens to be sitting in the Constitution, in Senate Rule XIX, in Riddick’s Senate Procedure, and in about a dozen court decisions that nobody arguing about this on the internet has bothered to read. So let us read them. I teach two subjects for a living and I write the textbooks for both, and the one thing I will not do is hand you a conclusion without showing you the work.
— WHAT THE CONSTITUTION ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT THE MAN HOLDING THE GAVEL —
Article I, Section 3, Clause 4:
“The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”
That is the whole thing. Twenty-six words. And here is what people miss when they skim it: the Framers did not write “the Vice President may preside if he feels like it.” They made him the President of the Senate. It is an office, not a courtesy title. The tie-breaking vote is described as the LIMITATION on the office, not the definition of it. Read the sentence again. The vote is the exception clause. The presiding is the rule.
The presiding officer of the Senate rules on points of order. He recognizes senators seeking the floor. He maintains order and can call a senator to order for transgressing the rules. The Parliamentarian, whose job people wildly misunderstand, ADVISES the chair. She does not bind it. Elizabeth MacDonough is a career professional who has served both parties since 2012 and by every account does her job with integrity, but the office she holds is advisory by design and always has been.
So the question is not whether the chair has power. The chair has power. The question is what happens when the chair uses it, and that question has an answer, and the answer comes from the courts.
— THE THREE DECISIONS THAT LEFT CONGRESS AS THE ONLY DOOR IN THE BUILDING —
Here is the part that should make every person who has been screaming about this for two years sit up.
Start with Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, 570 U.S. 1 (2013). Justice Scalia wrote it. Seven to two. Arizona’s Proposition 200 required documentary proof of citizenship to register. The Court struck it down, holding that the National Voter Registration Act’s command that states “accept and use” the federal form preempted Arizona’s add-on requirement.
Now read the reasoning instead of the headline, because the reasoning is the whole ballgame. Scalia grounded the decision in the Elections Clause, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1, which says the times, places and manner of holding elections shall be prescribed by each state legislature, “but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” The Court held that Elections Clause preemption is EASIER to find than ordinary Supremacy Clause preemption, because displacing state law is the entire point of the clause. Arizona lost because CONGRESS had already legislated and Arizona tried to legislate over the top of it.
Read that again slowly. Arizona lost because Congress holds the pen.
Second case. Fish v. Schwab, 957 F.3d 1105 (10th Cir. 2020). Kansas required documentary proof of citizenship. The Tenth Circuit struck it down under both the NVRA and the Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court denied certiorari on December 14, 2020. Same architecture, same outcome, same reason: a STATE cannot bolt a documentation requirement onto a federal registration scheme that Congress built.
Third case, and this is the one that should have ended the argument. League of United Latin American Citizens v. Executive Office of the President, in the District Court for the District of Columbia. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, enjoined Sections 2(a) and 2(d) of Executive Order 14248 in April 2025 and made it permanent that October. Her holding, in an opinion running well past eighty pages, was that the President cannot direct the Election Assistance Commission to add documentary proof of citizenship to the federal form, because that power belongs to Congress and to the states. Her line, and I am paraphrasing so I do not chew up somebody’s copyright, was that if the President acting alone could dictate the content of the federal form, Congress’s careful structural choices would count for nothing.
So let us tally the scoreboard.
The states cannot do it. Arizona tried. Kansas tried. Both lost.
The President cannot do it. He tried by executive order. He lost, and he lost to a judge applying a straightforward separation of powers analysis that, frankly, was correctly decided.
Congress can do it. Every single one of those rulings says so, explicitly, out loud, in the text of the opinion. The plaintiffs in all three cases WON on the theory that this is a job for Congress.
And then those same organizations turned around and lobbied the Senate to make sure Congress never gets to vote on it.
That is not a legal argument. That is a shell game with three cups and no pea. Quinn’s Twenty-Sixth Law of Liberalism: liberals like the courts, right up until the decision does not go their way, at which point the court is illegitimate and the judge is a threat to the republic. Except here they did not even need that step. They won the cases AND then blocked the remedy the cases pointed to. That is not hypocrisy. That is a closed loop, deliberately engineered, and anyone telling you the SAVE Act is unconstitutional is either a blatherskite who has not read the opinions or is counting on you not reading them either.
For the record, because I do not do one-sided: Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), upheld Indiana’s photo identification requirement for in-person voting. Six to three. Justice Stevens wrote the plurality, and if you know anything about Stevens, you know he was not exactly a right-wing firebrand. So voter identification per se is settled. What is unsettled is documentary proof of CITIZENSHIP at registration, and that is unsettled only because Congress has refused to settle it.
The road has one lane. The lane goes through the Senate floor. And the Senate floor is where this bill has been sitting since February 11, 2026, when the House passed it 218 to 213 with exactly one Democrat, Henry Cuellar of Texas, willing to vote for the proposition that only Americans should vote in American elections.
— WHY NO COURT WILL EVER RESCUE YOU FROM THE SENATE, AND WHY THAT CUTS BOTH WAYS —
Now for the part that matters procedurally, and this is where the people yelling at Vance and the people defending Vance both go into the ditch.
United States v. Ballin, 144 U.S. 1 (1892), is the foundational case on the Rules of Proceedings Clause, Article I, Section 5, Clause 2. The Court said the power to make rules is not exhausted by being exercised once. It is continuous. And within limits, that power is, in the Court’s own word, absolute, and beyond the challenge of any other body or tribunal.
The limits are narrow. A chamber rule cannot ignore constitutional restraints or violate fundamental rights, and there must be a reasonable relation between the method and the result sought. That is it. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this framing as recently as NLRB v. Noel Canning, 573 U.S. 513 (2014), quoting Ballin directly for the proposition that all matters of method are open to the determination of the Senate.
Ballin also settled the default: when a quorum is present, the act of a majority of the quorum is the act of the body. That is the constitutional baseline. Fifty-one. Not sixty. Sixty is a RULE. It is not in the Constitution. The word filibuster does not appear in the Constitution any more than the word democracy does, which we will get to.
Has anyone tried to sue over the filibuster? Repeatedly. It has never once reached the merits.
Common Cause v. Biden, 748 F.3d 1280 (D.C. Cir. 2014). Dismissed. Judicial Watch, Inc. v. United States Senate, 432 F.3d 359 (D.C. Cir. 2005). Dismissed. Page v. Shelby, 995 F. Supp. 23 (D.D.C. 1998). Dismissed.
Add Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811 (1997), which held that individual legislators generally lack standing to sue over the dilution of their institutional votes, and Field v. Clark, 143 U.S. 649 (1892), the enrolled bill rule, under which courts will not go behind the signed and attested text of a statute to audit how the sausage was made.
Then put the capstone on it. Nixon v. United States, 506 U.S. 224 (1993). Chief Justice Rehnquist. A federal judge argued that the Senate’s impeachment procedure violated the Constitution. The Court held the claim nonjusticiable, a political question, because the text commits the matter to the Senate and there are no judicially manageable standards for second-guessing it.
Now put all of that together and hold it in your head, because here is the payoff:
The Senate’s internal procedure is, for practical purposes, UNREVIEWABLE.
Everyone treats that as bad news. It is not. It is the single most important fact in this entire fight. It means that if the Vice President, presiding, rules on a point of order, and fifty-one senators vote to table the appeal and sustain the chair, there is no court in the United States that will unwind it. Not the D.C. Circuit. Not the Supreme Court. Nobody. The ruling becomes precedent the instant the appeal is tabled, and it stays precedent until a future Senate changes it.
That is exactly how it worked in November 2013 when Harry Reid did it to judicial nominations. It is exactly how it worked in April 2017 when Mitch McConnell extended it to the Supreme Court. Point of order. Chair rules. Appeal. Table the appeal at fifty-one. Done. New precedent. No litigation. No injunction. No robed referee riding in to blow the whistle.
Both parties have now used this mechanism. Both parties know it works. And the second one of them needs it again, they will use it again, and every senator currently clutching the 60-vote threshold like a rosary knows that too.
— THE FOUNDERS ALREADY SETTLED THE SUPERMAJORITY QUESTION, AND THEY DID NOT SETTLE IT THE WAY THE SENATE THINKS —
Since the institutionalists in the Republican conference keep invoking tradition, let us go check the founding documents they claim to be defending. I will wait while somebody dusts them off.
Federalist No. 22. Alexander Hamilton. On requiring more than a majority to decide:
“To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.”
Federalist No. 58. James Madison. Same subject:
“It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.”
Hamilton and Madison, the two men who built this system, both specifically warned that supermajority thresholds transfer power from the majority to the minority and paralyze the government. Not “might.” Would. They said it in print, in 1788, while campaigning for ratification.
And while we are in the Federalist Papers, let us clear up the other thing, because every time the SAVE Act comes up, somebody with a blue checkmark and a Ukrainian flag in the bio announces that voter identification is a threat to “our democracy.”
We are not a democracy. We never were.
The United States is a constitutional republic. The word “democracy” appears in the Constitution exactly zero times. The word “republic” appears once, in Article IV, Section 4, which guarantees to every state in this Union a Republican Form of Government. Madison in Federalist No. 10 distinguished a pure democracy, where citizens assemble and administer government in person, from a republic, where they act through representatives, and he wrote that democracies “have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention” and have been “as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
I am not being pedantic. I am correcting an error that got installed in your head by a teacher who got it installed in theirs. This happens constantly in education, and I say that as a teacher. There is no gravity in space. Blood is blue until it touches air. Einstein failed math. You only use ten percent of your brain. Chameleons change color to hide. Every one of those is false, every one of them is taught, and every one of them survives for decades because nobody goes back and checks.
“Democratic” is an adjective describing a process. “Democracy” is a noun describing direct majority rule. Our republic uses democratic processes filtered through constitutional constraints. That is the entire design. The Electoral College, the Senate itself, judicial review, the amendment process, all of it exists to prevent raw majority rule.
Which produces a delicious little problem for the people currently defending the filibuster on “protect the institution” grounds and the people currently attacking the SAVE Act on “protect democracy” grounds. Quinn’s Twenty-Second Law: liberals love democracy right up until it does not go their way. Voter identification polls at roughly eighty percent. So does citizenship verification. And the people who spent eight years telling you the will of the people is sacred are currently using a Senate rule invented in the twentieth century to make sure the will of the people never reaches a roll call.
Trying to reason through that contradiction with them is like trying to baptize a cat.
— RULE XIX SAYS SOMETHING THE CABLE PANELS NEVER READ ALOUD —
Now to the mechanics, which is where this gets genuinely useful.
Senate Rule XIX, paragraph 1(a), the core rule governing floor debate:
“When a Senator desires to speak, he shall rise and address the Presiding Officer, and shall not proceed until he is recognized, and the Presiding Officer shall recognize the Senator who shall first address him.”
Shall. Not may. The Congressional Research Service, in its standing report on filibusters and cloture, states this about as plainly as a federal agency ever states anything: Rule XIX affords the presiding officer no choice and no discretion in recognition. As a general rule, if a senator seeks recognition when no other senator has the floor, the presiding officer MUST recognize him or her, and may not decline for reasons of personal preference or partisan advantage.
So where does the Majority Leader’s famous power to control the floor come from?
Not from the rules. From a PRECEDENT. In 1937, Vice President John Nance Garner announced from the chair that he would recognize the Majority Leader first when multiple senators sought recognition simultaneously. That single announcement, by a Vice President, from the chair, is the foundation of nearly ninety years of Majority Leader floor control.
Sit with that. The most powerful procedural tool in the United States Senate exists because one Vice President said so out loud one afternoon in 1937 and nobody overturned him.
There is more in Rule XIX that never makes the evening news:
The two-speech rule. No senator may speak more than twice upon the same question in the same legislative day. Senate precedent holds that a senator called to order during a third speech loses the floor. Fifty senators exhausting two speeches each is a finite number. Filibusters are not actually infinite. They are only infinite because nobody makes anybody do the work.
The germaneness requirement. Paragraph 1(b) requires debate to be relevant to the pending question for the first three hours of each calendar day after the matter is brought before the Senate.
Paragraph 4. When a senator is called to order, he shall take his seat and may not proceed without leave of the Senate. The presiding officer may call a senator to order. So may another senator. A senator has the right to call a colleague to order without that colleague yielding for the purpose.
And the appeal. Any senator may appeal a ruling of the chair. But the motion to table an appeal is NOT debatable, and it passes at a simple majority.
Also worth noting: a senator who suggests the absence of a quorum loses the floor. And under a 1958 precedent, a senator who yields the floor temporarily and leaves the chamber has lost it, and the chair recognizes someone else.
Every one of those tools sits in the hands of the presiding officer or is triggered by rulings from the presiding officer. Every single one. And most of the people confidently explaining Senate procedure on television could not pour water out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel.
— SIX VICE PRESIDENTS WHO DID NOT SIT THERE LIKE A HOUSEPLANT —
The “the gavel is decorative” crowd has a problem, and the problem is the historical record.
John C. Calhoun, in the 1820s, used the presiding officer’s then-existing power to appoint Senate committees and stacked Foreign Relations with enemies of the Adams administration. He also declined to enforce certain debate rules against his allies. The Senate eventually stripped the appointment power away from the chair, which tells you something important: they took it away because he was USING it.
John Nance Garner, 1937, created the priority of recognition. Discussed above. Ninety years of consequences from one ruling.
Richard Nixon, 1957, at the opening of the 85th Congress, issued advisory opinions from the chair supporting the proposition that a current Senate majority may adopt its own rules at the start of a Congress, and that prior rules cannot permanently entrench supermajority requirements against that majority. Those opinions are the intellectual foundation of what is now called the constitutional option.
Hubert Humphrey ruled contrary to the Parliamentarian’s determination on the filibuster threshold in 1967 and again in 1969.
Nelson Rockefeller, during the 1975 fight that lowered cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths, actively managed recognition, overruled the Parliamentarian, and at points declined to recognize senators attempting to obstruct. He was savaged on the floor for it. The reform passed.
Dick Cheney, in 2005, stated publicly that if the question were presented to him as President of the Senate, he would rule that filibusters of judicial nominations were out of order. The Gang of Fourteen deal defused it before he had to. But the announcement itself moved the entire fight.
And then, for contrast, Kamala Harris. In March 2021, twenty-four Democratic members of Congress formally asked her to overrule the Parliamentarian on the fifteen-dollar minimum wage provision in reconciliation. She declined and followed the Parliamentarian’s determination. Whatever you think of her, she made a choice, and the fact that she was ASKED tells you that Democrats understood the chair’s authority perfectly well when they wanted it exercised.
Six Vice Presidents used the office. One declined. Zero of them were furniture. The claim that the President of the Senate is ceremonial is not a legal conclusion. It is a habit that people have mistaken for a rule, which is precisely what happened with the Garner precedent in the first place.
— PATH ONE: THE LIVE QUORUM, WHICH REQUIRES NO RULES CHANGE AT ALL —
On February 16, 2026, five days after the House passed the bill, Congressman Chip Roy circulated a Dear Colleague letter laying out the procedural landscape, and it is the single clearest document anyone in Congress has produced on this subject. Let me summarize the mechanics, because they matter enormously and almost nobody has read it.
First, the House was strategic about the vehicle. Rather than sending a freestanding bill, they attached the SAVE America Act as an amendment to S. 1383, a measure the Senate had ALREADY passed. Why does that matter? Because it eliminates the motion to proceed. Normally a bill faces two filibusters: one on getting to it, one on passing it. The House deleted the first one. The Senate only has to break one filibuster, not two.
Second, and this is the part that should be tattooed on somebody’s forearm: under existing Senate rules, at any given moment on that floor, exactly three things can be happening. Somebody is speaking. Somebody is voting. Or the Senate is establishing a quorum. That is the complete list.
Which means that if a quorum is physically present and no one is speaking, THE VOTE HAPPENS. Automatically. At a simple majority.
What the Senate does instead is the zombie filibuster. Nobody actually speaks. Nobody holds the floor for twenty hours reading the phone book. They simply fail to get sixty votes for cloture, everyone shrugs, the chamber slips into a quorum call, and the Majority Leader says we tried and we need to elect more Republicans. It is theater. It is a filibuster with no filibustering in it. All hat and no cattle.
Breaking it does not require nuking anything. It requires:
Fifty-one Republicans physically showing up and staying on the floor when summoned, which sounds easy and has apparently proven impossible.
The majority moving to table every single amendment the minority offers, which is a nondebatable motion, while requiring the minority to produce twenty senators for a sufficient second on every roll call.
The chair enforcing the two-speech rule and the germaneness requirement.
Keeping the Senate in continuous session, recessing rather than adjourning, so that the entire fight stays inside one legislative day and the two-speech clock never resets.
Do that, and the minority runs out of speeches. Mathematically. And then the presiding officer puts the question and the Senate votes at fifty-one, with the Vice President breaking a tie if it comes to that.
The Vice President’s role here is not theatrical. It is the chair enforcing Rule XIX against senators who have spent decades being allowed to ignore it. That is a real function. It is also a function that requires a Majority Leader willing to keep his conference in the building, which brings us to the honest part of this article.
— PATH TWO: THE CONSTITUTIONAL OPTION, AND EXACTLY HOW IT WORKS —
If the live quorum route is not taken, the other path is the one everybody calls nuclear. The mechanics are boring and well-documented:
A senator raises a point of order that cloture on the pending measure requires only a simple majority.
The presiding officer rules on the point of order.
Someone appeals the ruling of the chair.
Because the underlying question is nondebatable, the appeal is nondebatable. A simple majority votes to table the appeal. The chair is sustained. New precedent exists. It is over in under an hour.
That is the 2013 procedure and the 2017 procedure, run by opposite parties, four years apart, both times successfully, both times unreviewable by any court under everything we covered above.
Now here is where I am going to correct my own side, because overstating this hands the opposition an easy win and I refuse to do that.
In November 2013, when Harry Reid went nuclear, Vice President Joe Biden was not in the chair. Senator Patrick Leahy was. In April 2017, the gavel was likewise in a senator’s hand, not Vice President Pence’s. The constitutional option has NEVER required a Vice President. It requires a Majority Leader who has fifty-one votes in his pocket.
So anybody telling you that Vance can walk in, gavel Thune aside, fire the Parliamentarian on live television, and declare the legislative filibuster dead by fiat is selling you something. He cannot make a motion. He cannot introduce a bill. He cannot raise his own point of order. The chair’s power is exercised through recognizing senators and ruling on questions that senators raise. Every ruling is appealable, and a majority of the Senate can overturn the chair on the spot.
The gavel is not decorative. But it is also not a magic wand. It is a force multiplier, and a force multiplier applied to zero is still zero.
— SO WHO IS ACTUALLY BLOCKING THIS? LET US SAY THE NAMES —
Because the accountability belongs somewhere, and it is not with the man holding the gavel.
From February 11 through August 8 of this year, the SAVE America Act had the support of fifty of fifty-three Republican senators. Fifty. With the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote available under Article I, Section 3, that is enough to pass the bill at a simple majority the moment the 60-vote threshold is out of the way.
On April 23, Senator John Kennedy offered it as an amendment to a reconciliation bill. It failed 48 to 50. On June 4, Senator Lindsey Graham attached it to a separate reconciliation vehicle funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection. It failed again, 48 to 50. Both times, the same four Republicans joined every Democrat: Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
On July 30, Majority Leader John Thune said at a press conference that he is “for anything that we can do to get the SAVE America Act passed.” At the same press conference, he said there are not going to be fifty votes to get rid of the legislative filibuster.
Both statements cannot be load-bearing at the same time. One of them is a position and the other is a press release.
And to be scrupulously fair, because I would rather be right than loud: there IS a serious argument on the other side. Once the legislative filibuster is gone, everything that passes at fifty-one can be undone at fifty-one by the next majority. Court packing. D.C. statehood. National ballot harvesting mandates. Handing the next Democratic majority an unobstructed floor is, as an old friend of mine puts it, a bit like giving whiskey and car keys to a teenage boy. That argument deserves a hearing and it is not made in bad faith by everyone who makes it.
But it also means that the four names above have made a decision. They have decided that preserving a procedural tool invented in the twentieth century matters more than ensuring that only citizens register to vote in federal elections, on a question where public support runs around eighty percent. That is a choice. Own it or change it. Those are the options.
— THE PART WHERE THEY CALL IT JIM CROW 2.0 —
The Congressional Black Caucus has repeatedly labeled the SAVE Act “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Let me put the polling next to that sentence. Seventy-six percent of Black Americans support voter identification requirements. Eighty percent of Hispanic Americans. Eighty percent of white Americans. The CBC is not speaking for Black America on this. The data is not ambiguous.
And notice what the “Jim Crow 2.0” position logically REQUIRES you to believe. Strip away every layer of vocabulary about access and barriers and disenfranchisement, and you are left with exactly one claim: that Black Americans are uniquely incapable of obtaining a document that every other adult in this country produces as a matter of routine. The same document required to drive, to fly, to open a bank account, to rent an apartment, to buy a beer, to pick up a controlled prescription, to start a job under federal I-9 verification, or to get credentialed into a Democratic National Convention.
That is not advocacy. That is contempt wearing a compassion costume.
I teach in a high-need, high-risk district in Northeast Ohio. Public schools gave up on a lot of my students before they arrived. Unstable housing. Parents working two and three jobs. Every single time one of those kids has needed identification for something that mattered to them, they got it. Because they are capable human beings, and telling them otherwise is the most quietly racist thing happening in American politics right now.
Now, since we are on the subject of who exactly gets to lecture whom about race and filibusters:
The record-holder for filibustering civil rights legislation in the United States Senate was Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, a former Ku Klux Klan RECRUITER, who personally held the floor for over fourteen hours against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, part of a Southern Democratic filibuster that consumed roughly sixty working days of Senate floor time. He remained a Democratic senator until his death in 2010 and was eulogized by Democratic presidents as the conscience of the Senate.
And if anyone wants to run the “your side has a race problem” play, I would like to introduce the current Democratic nominee for United States Senate in Maine.
Graham Platner wore an SS Totenkopf, the Death’s Head insignia of the units that ran the concentration camps, tattooed on his chest for eighteen years. In 2014 he watched footage of Hamas terrorists killing Israeli soldiers and wrote, “Damn fine looking and successful raid. I dig it.” He appeared on a podcast hosted by a documented Holocaust denier and called himself a longtime fan. He retweeted a white supremacist and quietly deleted it. He asked in a Reddit thread why Black people do not tip. He called rural white Americans, as a category, stupid and racist. He described himself as a communist, repeatedly, in writing, under his own handle. He advocated that an armed working class is a requirement for economic justice.
He was recruited by Chuck Schumer. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders. And Elizabeth Warren flew to Maine, stood next to him, and called him “my kind of man.”
These are the people telling me that requiring a birth certificate to register to vote is Jim Crow. Quinn’s Second Law: if you want to know what liberals are doing, pay close attention to what they accuse conservatives of doing. It has never failed. It is the most reliable predictive instrument in American politics, and it is free.
While we are here: Steve Cohen, a white Democrat representing a majority-Black district in Memphis, has been denied membership in the Congressional Black Caucus. A body that excludes members based on race is lecturing the country about racial exclusion. I would call that irony, but irony implies someone noticed.
— THE 1963 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD, SINCE WE ARE KEEPING SCORE —
On January 10, 1963, Congressman Albert S. Herlong Jr. of Florida read into the permanent Congressional Record a list of forty-five communist goals for America, drawn from W. Cleon Skousen’s research. I am not asking anybody to believe in a conspiracy. I am a science teacher. I ask you to evaluate OUTCOMES and let the intent argument sort itself out.
Goal 15: Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
Goal 16: Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
Goal 29: Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, and out of step with modern needs.
Now look at what we just walked through. A federal statute passed under an express constitutional grant of power, blocked by a chamber rule that appears nowhere in the Constitution, defended by people who insist the Constitution’s own majority-rule baseline is dangerous and outdated, while advocacy organizations use “technical decisions of the courts” to strike down every state and executive attempt to accomplish the same thing.
I am not saying anybody held a meeting with a checklist. I am saying the outcomes are indistinguishable from what a checklist would have produced. Sixty-three years later. Read the list yourself, it is in the Congressional Record, and unlike most things people cite on this platform, you can actually go look it up.
— THE OTHER BILL THIS SENATE CANNOT FIND FLOOR TIME FOR —
I want to connect something, because it is the same chamber, the same excuses, and the same four-hundred-page vocabulary deployed to avoid a vote.
Section 3(b) of the SAVE Act lists what counts as documentary proof of citizenship. One of the accepted forms is a United States military identification card together with a military record of service showing the applicant’s place of birth was in the United States. Congress wrote a specific carve-in for the people who wore the uniform.
Which is more consideration than that same Congress has shown those people on the Major Richard Star Act.
H.R. 2102. Roughly 54,000 combat-wounded veterans, medically retired before hitting twenty years because a bomb or a bullet ended the career they signed up for, currently watching the federal government claw back their retirement pay dollar-for-dollar against their VA disability compensation. Two separate benefits, earned for two separate reasons, and the government takes one to pay for the other. We fixed this for twenty-year retirees back in 2004. We just never got around to the ones whose careers were ended by the enemy.
Senator Roger Wicker CO-SPONSORED that bill in 2021. Then he objected to unanimous consent and blocked it. He told the floor it amounts to a double benefit we cannot afford. He has cited a figure of roughly seventy billion dollars.
The CBO-certified cost is $9.75 billion over TEN YEARS. Under one billion a year.
One day after blocking it, Senator Wicker voted yea on a $924.7 billion NDAA. In November he voted yea on a $1.5 trillion continuing appropriations bill.
Let me put $1.5 trillion in terms my students would understand, because abstract numbers do nothing to the human brain. Stack that in one-dollar bills and the stack reaches approximately 102,000 MILES HIGH. That is 408 TIMES TALLER THAN MOUNT EVEREST, and roughly HALFWAY TO THE MOON, which sits 238,900 miles out. Lay those bills end to end and they wrap around the EARTH’S EQUATOR 5,884 TIMES. Divided among taxpayers, $1.5 trillion works out to $18,750 PER PERSON. Not a gift. An addition to what each of us owes.
He found $924.7 billion in one bill and $1.5 trillion in another. He cannot find $975 million a year for Americans who came home in pieces.
What is next? A United States senator co-sponsors a bill for combat-wounded veterans, then personally blocks the Senate from even VOTING on it, then invents a cost figure seven times the actual CBO score to justify it, and then approves nearly a trillion dollars in spending the following day… wait. I am being told that already happened. My mistake.
Same Senate. Same gavel. Same excuse.
—WHY THE SAVE ACT MATTERS—
The Department of Homeland Security has publicly asserted that over 250,000 non-citizens are registered in four states whose files were reviewed, and that states running records through the SAVE system have identified over 28,000 non-citizen registrants and over 400,000 deceased registrants across 68 million records as of June 22, 2026. Those are AGENCY ASSERTIONS. They are not court-tested findings, no methodology was published, and historically these matching exercises have produced false positives, including naturalized citizens flagged as non-citizens. I am going to say that out loud even though it is inconvenient, because I would rather cite one verified fact than five that fall apart under cross-examination.
And the honest counter-data cuts the other way too. In the Kansas litigation, the state could conclusively document only about 39 non-citizens registering over a long period, while more than 30,000 lawful applicants failed to complete registration under the documentary requirement. That is a real finding by a real court and I am not going to pretend it does not exist.
Here is why it strengthens the case for the SAVE Act rather than weakening it. Kansas failed because Kansas built a blunt instrument. The SAVE Act is written to address exactly that failure mode: it accepts REAL ID-compliant identification indicating citizenship, a valid U.S. passport, a military ID paired with a service record showing U.S. birth, or a birth certificate paired with photo identification. Section 2(f) specifically builds a process for name discrepancies, which is the married-women problem the critics correctly raised in the Kansas case. The bill is a REVISION informed by the litigation, not a repeat of it.
That is what legislating looks like when you actually do it instead of filibustering it. And that is precisely why it should get a floor vote, be amended in the open, and be voted on by name so that every senator has to own their position in front of the country. Quinn’s Twelfth Law: liberals do not engage in debate, they try to silence you, because if they engaged in debate they would lose.
— THE THREE-CHOICE TRAP —
To every senator currently hiding behind “the votes are not there,” I would like to offer you a multiple choice question. My students take these every week. There are three options and you have to pick one.
Option A: You have not actually read Rule XIX, Riddick’s, or the Chip Roy memo, and you do not know that a live quorum and the two-speech rule can break a filibuster under existing rules without changing a thing. That is ignorance of the tools of your own job.
Option B: You HAVE read them, you understand them perfectly, and you have decided that keeping the Senate’s schedule comfortable and your August recess intact is worth more than an eighty-percent issue. That is cowardice.
Option C: You never wanted the bill to pass. You wanted the ISSUE. A bill that passes stops generating fundraising emails. A bill that dies in the Senate generates them forever. That is fraud on your own voters.
Ignorance, cowardice, or fraud. Pick one and put your name on it, because from out here in Ohio, where I grade papers at a kitchen table and feed six people on a teacher’s salary, the three are becoming indistinguishable.
And let me be the first to CONGRATULATE the United States Senate on a truly magnificent August. Eighty percent of the country agrees on something, and you found a way to not vote on it, and then you went on vacation for five weeks, and you did it all without a single senator having to stand up and speak for even one hour in defense of their position. Bravo. Genuinely. That takes discipline. Most institutions could not achieve that level of nothing if they planned it for a year.
— WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO ABOUT IT —
Not the gavel. The votes. Here is the honest action list:
Call Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, and Tillis. They are the four. Not Vance. Not Thune, though he could show more spine on floor management. Those four. Capitol switchboard: 202-224-3121.
Call YOUR senators regardless of party, because your own delegation has the most incentive to listen to you specifically.
Ask them one question and refuse to accept a pamphlet: will you support forcing a live quorum and enforcing Rule XIX’s two-speech rule on S. 1383, which requires NO change to Senate rules whatsoever? Watch how fast the talking points run out.
And while you have them on the phone, ask about the Major Richard Star Act. Volume works. Coordinated calls from a lot of veterans work better than a well-written letter from one.
But what do I know. I am only a science teacher who read the actual text of Rule XIX, the CBO score, and three court opinions before typing, which apparently makes me better prepared than most of the people who get paid to explain the United States Senate on television.
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COMMENT below with your take. Should the Vice President enforce the plain text of Rule XIX and abandon the 1937 Garner precedent, or is the priority-of-recognition custom worth more than the SAVE Act? Tell me. I want to hear the argument against it.
And if you want MORE of this, the data, the history, the science, the stories, JOIN Bski’s Classroom community or follow me on YouTube. Even better, subscribe to my account. It is about the cost of a cup of coffee per month. That is it. Your support keeps this classroom open, and I promise I will never run out of material as long as the left keeps trying to out-dumb itself.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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