House to vote next week to require citizenship check and photo ID for voting, upping Senate pressure
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said floor vote will force Democrats to declare where they stand on two election integrity items widely supported by Americans.
The U.S. House of Representatives will vote next week on a new bill that would require all states to check both citizenship and photo identification before allowing voters to cast ballots, combining two widely popular election integrity provisions and ramping up pressure on a Senate that has been unwilling to consider either mandate.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, confirmed in an interview Wednesday evening with Just the News that the vote will be held next week for the Save America Act, which combines the two requirements that have passed the House individually but not received a vote in the GOP-controlled Senate.
Roy is the chief sponsor of the legislation in the House, joined by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, in the Senate.
"I'm announcing that we are bringing Chip's bill, the SAVE America Act, to the House floor next week," Scalise said in an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "So it's on the floor, and everybody's got to pick a side: do you want to make sure that only American citizens vote in elections and that you have to show an ID to vote?
"You can't get into a bar, you can't get on an airplane without an ID and if we want to make sure the franchise of America's democracy is in place, let's do this as well," Scalise added.
Roy credited Trump for coming up with the new name for the bill and said he expects the president to pressure senators and Democrats in swing states to vote for it.
"Look, everybody wants this," Roy said. "People say, and Democrats are going to say, 'Oh, it's racist.' 'This is Jim Crow.' That's nonsense. You look at the polling. CNN had polling that 80% of people, regardless of skin color, believe that we should have voter ID.
"You got to have real ID to get on a plane. You got to have ID to go to baseball games. You can certainly have an identification to go vote in elections to defend the sovereignty of our country," he added.
Roy called on Senate Leader John Thune to change the filibuster rules in that chamber — making Democrats stand and talk until they tire to keep a filibuster blockade going — to give Republicans a chance to eventually get the legislation passed over Democrat opposition before the 2026 election.
"I just hope, once we move it through the House next week, that leader soon will force a talking filibuster to get us to have a real fight over in the Senate. But right now, our first job is to get it through the House," he said.
The House passed Roy's SAVE Act in April, which would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act to ensure states require documentation of a person's U.S. citizenship before registering to vote in federal elections. However, the legislation did not require voters to present photo identification.
Although non-citizens are already prohibited from voting in federal, state, and most local elections, municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont, and Washington, D.C., allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.