Thursday, February 5, 2026

Republicans in the House and Senate spar over Trump’s election takeover threats

Donald Trump’s call for the government to “nationalize” voting has unsurprisingly caused Republicans to have tummyaches, with some of the more establishment types saying it would violate states’ rights, but others seeming to cheer him on.

Trump made his push to nationalize voting on the show of Dan Bongino, who, up until recently, served as his deputy FBI director. Unsurprisingly, he called predominantly Democratic cities like Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit too corrupt to hold their own elections.

Trump’s plan would, needless to say, be a breach of the U.S. Constitution, since states run elections. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that the president believes in the Constitution.

“The president believes in the United States Constitution,” she said, though she added a caveat. “However, he believes there has obviously been a lot of fraud and irregularities that have taken place in American elections.”

Leavitt said that he specifically was supporting the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, a Republican piece of legislation that would require voter identification and restrict mail-in ballots. It’s long been a priority of Republicans, particularly in the House of Representatives.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said that the legislation would not violate the principles of federalism.

But even if the SAVE Act passed, it would still need to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, which Democrats will inevitably invoke. And Republicans in the Senate say that’s unlikely. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has emerged as a critic of Trump, said he is a co-sponsor of the SAVE Act on the Senate side but did not like nationalization.

“But nationalizing elections, to me, are as bad now as when I said they were bad when the Democrats tried to do it in 2022,” he told The Independent. “There's never a good time to nationalize elections. There's never a good time to nuke the filibuster.”

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By Eric Garcia

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Daily briefing

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I learned that maybe we could use a little bit of a softer touch.

President Donald Trump concedes that turning down the temperature is necessary amid the chaos in Minneapolis stemming from the ICE surge in the city.

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