The Senate returned from recess this week with the Save America Act still stalled, and Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to argue that the only realistic path to passage runs through ending the legislative filibuster, and that Republican senators who resist that step are clinging to a version of the Senate that no longer exists and will not exist regardless of what they decide to do.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune used floor time this week to call out Democratic hypocrisy on the voter ID question directly, noting that Democratic senators from New York, Georgia, and Colorado have all publicly said they support voter ID while voting against a bill that allows driver’s licenses, state ID cards, and tribal identification cards as acceptable forms of proof. The senator from Colorado, Thune noted, voted no specifically because the bill does not allow voters to use a utility bill as identification, a standard that Thune observed would not get you a beer at a brewery, let alone verify your identity for a federal election. Johnson said Thune’s speech was excellent but that it will not move the needle because the legacy media will not cover it and Democratic senators are not responding to rhetorical pressure. They are, in his view, protecting an electoral infrastructure they believe is existential to their long-term goal of maintaining political dominance.
Johnson said his analysis of Democratic intentions is straightforward and based on their stated positions. When Democrats next control the White House, the Senate, and the House simultaneously, they will eliminate the filibuster. They have said so explicitly. They attempted it during the Biden years and were stopped only by Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, whose defections conservatives celebrated at the time. Now there are Republican senators who see themselves playing the same heroic role as Sinema and Manchin by protecting the filibuster from their own party’s majority, and Johnson said he understands the logic but believes it is wrong given current political realities. The difference, he argued, is that Republicans want to use a filibuster-free Senate to create prosperity and preserve freedom, while Democrats plan to use it to pack the Supreme Court, add Washington DC and Puerto Rico as states, nationalize elections, and entrench one-party rule.
He cited the Senate’s performance record as evidence that the institution is already broken beyond the point where procedural norms provide meaningful protection. Since Johnson arrived in the Senate, Congress should have passed one hundred and eighty appropriations bills on time before the start of each fiscal year they funded. It has passed six, a failure rate of over ninety-six percent. The chamber just endured a forty-two-day shutdown. DHS funding remains unresolved. Thirty-nine trillion dollars in debt has accumulated. His conclusion is that the Senate as a deliberative institution producing bipartisan results is not something that can be recovered by restraint. It is already gone, and the question is whether Republicans use the time and majority they have now to accomplish things that matter or preserve procedural traditions that Democrats have already demonstrated they will abandon the moment it suits them.
JD Vance, speaking at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia, made a similar argument from a different angle, noting that ten years ago roughly thirty-five senators supported the Save America Act’s voter integrity principles while today the number is forty-five or forty-six, and that the answer to frustration over the remaining gap is not to disengage but to demand more from elected officials and build further political momentum. Johnson said the pressure being applied is having an effect and that if an actual floor vote on ending the filibuster were forced, it might take only three or four Republican holdouts to make the difference, though he acknowledged it could be a larger number depending on who would commit to the position publicly versus privately.
Proft raised the release of an intelligence community inspector general transcript confirming that Adam Schiff lied about the predicate whistleblower complaint that launched the first Trump impeachment, and Trump’s Truth Social post supporting a clean reauthorization of FISA Section 702 despite his own administration having been its most prominent abuse victim. Johnson said Cash Patel and John Ratcliffe briefed Senate colleagues and made a convincing case that the intelligence community needs the tool, which is presumably the same case they made to Trump himself. He said he wishes there were time to reform Section 702 before reauthorizing it, but that the clock has run out and if Trump, having experienced its abuses more directly than anyone, says the military and intelligence community need it, that is a compelling enough argument to proceed with reauthorization and address reforms in a subsequent legislative cycle.
On Wisconsin, Johnson said the state Supreme Court race results reveal a turnout problem rather than a fundamental ideological shift. He walked through three consecutive losses, noting that in each case the conservative candidate received a significantly lower percentage of Donald Trump’s presidential vote total than the liberal candidate received of the Democratic presidential nominee’s total. In the most recent race, the conservative candidate got roughly thirty-five percent of Trump’s vote total while the liberal candidate received about fifty percent of Kamala Harris’s, a disparity that reflects Republican voters not showing up for down-ballot judicial races rather than any persuasion toward the other side. He said he does not know how to fix that at the individual voter level but that the consequences are severe given how much consequential policy in Wisconsin flows through the state Supreme Court.