The Senate debate over the Save America Act entered its second week with Republican unity showing visible cracks, as senators Mike Lee, John Kennedy, and Majority Leader John Thune publicly aired disagreements over procedural strategy while Democrats continued advancing the argument that noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal and therefore requires no new enforcement mechanism.
Chadwick Moore, senior reporter for news features at the New York Post and New York Times bestselling author of Tucker, the biography of Tucker Carlson, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the state of play on the legislation and a range of other issues dominating the political conversation.
On the Save America Act itself, Moore said the polling case for passing it is about as strong as any legislation he has seen, with support running between seventy and eighty-five percent across surveys depending on the sample, including majority support among Democrats. He argued that the public dispute between Lee and Kennedy over whether to pursue passage through regular order or attempt to route pieces of the legislation through budget reconciliation should have been resolved privately before senators started making contradictory arguments on the floor. Lee has maintained that the Save America Act cannot pass through reconciliation because it is a policy measure rather than a budgetary one and would not survive the procedural standard required, while Kennedy has argued for using every available legislative vehicle when the regular path is stalled. Thune has positioned himself somewhere between the two, telling colleagues at a recent caucus lunch that reconciliation remains an option worth examining. Moore’s view aligned with Proft’s assessment that the disagreement, conducted publicly, hands ammunition to opponents and projects exactly the kind of disarray that makes already skeptical swing voters less confident the majority can govern.
On the underlying question of whether noncitizen voting actually occurs in meaningful numbers, Moore said his reporting has led him to a nuanced conclusion that splits the difference between the two sides. It happens, he said, with certainty, and is more widespread than Democrats acknowledge, but it is also less dramatic in its mechanics than many conservatives assume. The typical case, he said, is not a recent border crosser deliberately seeking to influence an election. It is more often a long-term resident who has been in the country for years, perhaps with a deportation order and perhaps without, who gets prompted to register at a motor vehicle office or at a festival by someone with a clipboard, assumes that the prompt means they are eligible, and clicks yes. A 2013 Supreme Court interpretation of a 1990s federal law holds that states are not required to verify citizenship at the point of voter registration, leaving the system on what Moore called an honor system that creates exactly the kind of undetectable violation that Mike Lee’s stop sign analogy was designed to illustrate.
Moore said his reporting found at least a dozen documented cases of noncitizens voting in recent elections, some of whom had been casting ballots in every federal election since 2000, and that the violations spanned both parties in registration though skewed significantly toward Democrats. He noted a guilty plea entered the previous day by an election judge in Hubbard County, Minnesota, who admitted to allowing eleven unregistered individuals to vote in the 2024 general election, a case brought to light by another election judge who reported the conduct. The argument that existing law makes such violations self-deterring, he said, ignores the fact that the same system makes them nearly impossible to detect or prosecute.
The conversation broadened to the sprawling benefits fraud investigation in Minnesota centered on the Feeding Our Future scandal, which now involves roughly eighty individuals of Somali origin or questionable citizenship status, with Moore noting that the model of simply knocking on the doors of addresses registered as receiving state daycare, hospice, or autism program funding is already producing copycat investigations in Washington state and elsewhere. He said the pattern of states like New York and other blue jurisdictions keeping vendor payment data shielded from public view, while Minnesota’s transparency in publishing that information is precisely what enabled the original fraud to be uncovered, is not accidental. Moore noted that a significant portion of the organizations benefiting from Medicaid and related programs in those states are donors to powerful Democratic politicians. He said the incoming associate attorney general is expected to serve as JD Vance’s point person on federal fraud investigations of this kind and that the window between now and the midterms is the critical period for that work to produce visible results.
Proft then turned to Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with The Economist, in which Carlson said he believes the Iran campaign represents a direct betrayal of the America First promise Trump made repeatedly over a decade of campaigning, and that there is no coherent argument that regime change in Iran serves American interests. Carlson also told The Economist that the United States must accept a multipolar world and share power with China given the scale of that country’s economy, a framing Proft noted sits in some tension with opposing military engagement against Iran on America First grounds while accepting Chinese co-dominance as consistent with the same doctrine. Moore, who spent extensive time with Carlson while writing his biography, said he does not see a meaningful evolution in Carlson’s thinking on these questions. Carlson was horrified by the Iraq War, traveled there in 2002 as a supporter and returned disillusioned, and has held a consistent position since that American military involvement in the Middle East is a fool’s errand regardless of the justification offered. Moore suggested that a significant part of what drives Carlson’s public positioning on any given issue is the experience of being told a topic is off limits, which reliably produces the opposite effect. The people who loved him for that quality on Fox News, Moore said, may simply be different people than those who find it appealing today.