Trump Furious as Republicans Kill his Election Scheme

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2:07Michael Popok:They're about to burn Senate Majority Leader John Thune in effigy on the right because he refuses to bring to the Senate floor the SAVE Act, Donald Trump and MAGA's phony piece of legislation that will only result in having tens of millions of Americans lose their right to vote because they don't have proof of citizenship handily on them or a ID with their proper name on it, including women who have gotten married, who don't have access to their birth certificate, their name doesn't match what's on their birth certificate, would all be denied the ability to vote under the SAVE Act. What the rightest of right-wing MAGA want John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, to do is to bring it to a vote on the House floor and perhaps throw away hundreds of years of Senate tradition and get rid of what's called the filibuster.

3:08Michael Popok:But John Thune's not going to do that. And Donald Trump is sort of mad at him. But right-wing MAGA like Elon Musk and Cleta Mitchell and Mark Meadows, of all people, back from his Jan 6 insurrection participation and his voting more than once when he was the chief of staff for Donald Trump, is back beating down the door to John Thune. But the filibuster looks like it's going to hold a Michael Popak. You're the Midas Touch Network and Legal AF. Let's sit at the intersection of law and politics and voting rights. So the SAVE Act got passed by the House. In it, it has all sorts of new requirements that improperly puts the federal government effectively in charge with elections.

3:57Michael Popok:Elections, even for federal office, our framers and our founding fathers wanted in the hands of the states. You see it in the Constitution. You see it in the Tenth Amendment. And that's the way it's always been, for good reason, because they didn't trust the federal government when they formed the United States of America. They certainly did not want the feds telling the states what to do about federal elections for federal office. They didn't want the feds running their own elections, if you know what I mean. And so when I registered to vote, I signed, as you probably did, under penalty of perjury, that I resided where I said I resided.

4:37Michael Popok:that I was a U.S. citizen, I would vote in my precinct, check the box. And if I didn't, and I violated any of those sworn statements, I could be prosecuted for crimes. That's that sort of good faith trust that has been pretty good for hundreds of years of voting in America, at least in the modern era. You know, we trust people. We trust people who sign sworn declarations that they're not committing crimes and who understand that they can be prosecuted if they do. It's not good enough for Donald Trump because he wants to create this fake narrative that we have such massive voting fraud in America that it stole the election from him.

5:25Michael Popok:And we know that's not true because there's been empirical studies and evidence and 70 court cases and audits and the FBI and local state investigative agencies that have all looked at it and determined that the most fraud in any election is somewhere along the lines of 0.0001 percent, 0.0001 percent. It happens. Dead person votes, somebody votes their mother-in-law's ballot, whatever. But it's not enough to change the outcome of an election. It's infinitesimal. You're talking about eight to 10 fraudulent ballots in an entire state election, if that. And they're prosecuted for it. So Save Act says, let's go after transgender people again.

6:18Michael Popok:Here we go. So they're going to have to come up with some ID that matches their birth, not their current name or their legal name. He's got to go after the transgender community because Donald Trump thinks that's a winning strategy again to win at the midterms, continuing to beat mercilessly this defenseless group of people in America. And it's also having the effect that 20 to 30 % of Americans, especially black and brown and women, don't have the documents necessary to satisfy the SAVE Act to vote. You know, okay, I have a passport. I have a birth certificate with my proper name on it. But my wife doesn't because her birth certificate's from another country.

7:05Michael Popok:It has a different last name on it. You know, now she's got her new documents. She's a citizen. She can vote. But there's that mismatch that the SAVE Act would prevent her from voting. Now, once the House passed it, it gets over to the Senate. That's where John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, comes in. Now, he likes to be liked. Whereas the prior Senate Majority Leader, Mitchell, he didn't really care about being liked. In fact, he liked to be the enemy. He liked to be the dark senator. But not Thune. He's from South Dakota. He likes to talk about sports and be liked. The reality is he is not going to lead an uprising of Senate tradition to get rid of the filibuster.

7:51Michael Popok:Now, what's the filibuster? The filibuster used to be in old timey times, a person could get up in the minority against the bill being passed and speak and prevent the vote for hours or days on end. Right. Think of Mr. Smith goes to Washington or Cory Booker recently. hours and hours and hours and not relinquish the podium and try to block the vote. But now you don't have to do that any longer. You can do what's called just a verbal filibuster, meaning you just signal that you are going to filibuster if you are required to. So once you say, I'm going to filibuster, in order to defeat the filibuster and get it to a House, sorry, to the floor of the Senate for a vote, a simple majority vote, there has to be 60 senators out of the 100 who vote for something called cloture, C-L-O-T-U-R-E, which kills the filibuster and allows for the vote.

9:03Michael Popok:So it seems a little bit counterintuitive, but you need 60 votes in order to then put it to a vote, which can pass by simple majority, 51. Okay. So that means the minority through filibuster can block the vote that would normally pass on a simple majority if it could get to a vote. Well, I was getting ready to talk about the news and politics today, and my cat Chanel decided she was the headline. She doesn't care about politics, but she has extremely strong opinions about her food. If this show ever runs late, it's because she refuses to let me talk about law and politics until her Smalls cat food is handled first.

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11:17Michael Popok:Because that's a real possibility, right? Especially in the world of Donald Trump. Now, Donald Trump has been trying to get John Thune to pass the SAVE Act, meaning to change the filibuster rules and allow for a simple majority vote on the SAVE Act. Here's Trump trying to twist the arm of John Thune.

11:42MeidasTouch:But we're going to push them to get it done because I don't think you can politically exist if you're not going to do voter ID and these things. I don't think the people in this country will stand for it. So I'm making my biggest plea tonight. It'll make you and I'm not doing it for this reason at all It'll guarantee the midterms. It'll guarantee the midterms If you don't get it big trouble my opinion if you get this your midterms and they know it for two reasons number one they won't be able to cheat and Number two the people are demanding it every time I go out Save America, sir. Save America act.

12:20MeidasTouch:We want the Save America acts that's all they talk about they don't talk about housing they don't talk about anything that's what they talk about and if you send it up that you're going to win the midterms at levels that you can't even believe and you're going to win every election for a long time until somebody really screws things up and hopefully that won't happen but i've never been more confident that if we keep these promises and deliver in this popular agenda the american people will stand with us in overwhelming numbers just as they did in 2024. Is Senator Stoon listening to you when you say you want to pass the Save America Act?

12:58MeidasTouch:He says there aren't the votes to do it right now. What's your response? Well, he's got to be a leader. You know, he's a leader. He's got to get him. It's the most popular bill I've ever seen put before Congress. And it's voter ID and it's voter. You have to be able to be a citizen to vote. You've got it's called citizenship. and we're also adding in no men playing in women's sports, no transgender mutilization of our children, and no mail-in ballots, fake mail-in ballots. We have none of that except in the case of the military, etc.

13:36MeidasTouch:It is the Save America Act. It's the most popular bill I think I've ever put before.

13:44Michael Popok:Now, the rest of MAGA is apoplectic. You know, Elon Musk is calling for the nuclear option of getting rid of the filibuster once and for all. And Mark Meadows, of all people, who was Donald Trump's chief of staff in the first administration, who was prosecuted himself for voting twice in the same election in two different precincts. he's apoplectic he wants to save that cleta mitchell who used to be a reasonably well considered election lawyer in milwaukee she's gone cuckoo she runs voter protection organizations that want to constantly hit voting rights and undermine your ability and steal your vote from you by setting up unreasonable and unconstitutional barriers to your vote so they're all they want Thune to grow a pair.

14:38Michael Popok:It's not going to happen. It's a political point. Thune doesn't even want to, frankly, have the showdown and have a show vote where it shows how many votes would have passed if it wasn't for the filibuster. He doesn't even want to do that, to have it be, see, it would have passed if we got rid of the filibuster. So the good news is that the SAVE Act looks dead on arrival, even under John Thune in the Senate. So at least that portion of Donald Trump's attempt to take over the federal election looks like it's dead. He's trying other things, right? He's trying maybe throw the military, have them around a polling place to scare voting.

15:21Michael Popok:He's trying to screw around with mail-in voting. Nonetheless, he's got some court cases that are making their way up the chain. But for now, the Democrats and public interest groups are doing a good job tamping down Donald Trump's obvious appetite to take over federal elections. Because he also wants to get, as we know, get his hands on voter rolls. He wants to purge the voter rolls, meaning take your name off the list. So when you go down to vote, they say, sorry, Mrs. Smith or Mr. Johnson, your name has been removed from the voter rolls by Donald Trump. That's what he's trying to do. And we'll continue to follow it.

16:05Michael Popok:I'm glad you're here. I'm Miles Dutch and Legal AF. Take a minute, help us over on Legal AF. Trying to get to that next level, 1.1 million subscribers. With your help, we will. Until my next report, I'm Michael Popak. Can't get your fill of Legal AF? Me neither. That's why we formed the Legal AF Substack. Every time we mention something in a hot take, whether it's a court filing or a oral argument, come over to the Substack. You'll find the court filing and the oral argument there, including a daily roundup that I do call, wait for it, Morning AF. What else? All the other contributors from Legal AF are there as well.

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