WASHINGTON — Olive Garden joined the talking points on Capitol Hill last week as U.S. House leadership attached language that restricts who can vote onto nearly every bill that cleared the lower chamber before representatives headed home until September.
The Orlando-based chain of Italian restaurants, whose current marketing pitch is “embrace the obsession,” requires photo identification to become a “Pasta Passholder” and receive unlimited pasta refills.
“Can we at least have the Olive Garden standard when we protect the democracy and the franchise that we have to keep this great democracy?” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, asked his colleagues while pitching a bill in which he and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Benton, had language inserted from the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE America Act.
President Donald Trump insists that Congress pass legislation that would require applicants to prove their citizenship when registering to vote and produce a picture ID when casting a ballot, along with limiting use of mail-in ballots. He refused to sign any more bills into law, including a bipartisan one aimed at lowering housing costs, until the SAVE Act passed.
A group of right-wingers had disrupted procedural votes required to bring an instrument, even ones they support, to the floor, effectively stalling work in the House for several weeks and provoking the famously even-tempered Johnson to reportedly cuss at one of his members.
Bits of SAVE Act wording, as appropriate to the instrument, were added to bills that fund the U.S. State Department, to OK the National Defense Authorization Act, plus the Stop Insider Trading Act, as well as a bill that sets up a Budget Reconciliation which, if passed, would allow the Senate to increase appropriations with a simple GOP majority of 51 votes instead of the 60 votes usually needed.
“Conservatives in the House of Representatives consider the SAVE America Act to be a non-negotiable, nation-saving piece of legislation,” Rep. Clay Higgins, R-Lafayette, said in a statement. “Yet some Senators seem indifferent to the will of the American people. The House of Representatives’ hard work on this core issue has produced a three-track legislative opportunity for the Senate to get the job done.”
But that’s not really going to work, said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge. The idea has been debated and shot down by the Senate six times since January 2025, when Trump took office for the second time.
A SAVE America Act cosponsor, Cassidy said the bill needs to be expanded to incentivize participation — for instance, by forbidding closed party primaries in federal elections, like the one in May that will end his 12 years in the Senate come January.
He points out that the newly enacted May 16 closed party primary attracted only 401,174 Louisiana Republicans, about 32% of registered GOP voters. In his last election in 2020, when the primaries were open to all comers, 70.1% of the state’s registered voters participated and he won with 1.2 million votes or 59% of those cast.
“We need to make it easier for the American people to vote,” Cassidy said, adding that the bill also shouldn’t restrict use of mail-in ballots. “And right now, (voters) are being progressively disenfranchised by people cynically using the rules to favor their particular political position.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, told reporters Thursday that he simply doesn’t have the 50 Republican votes necessary to advance the budget framework sent over by the House with SAVE language that would allot $73 billion to fund the military and intelligence agencies, $12 billion for farmers and $10 billion for SAVE Act changes.
He saucily added that if Trump’s allies think it possible, they should get the president on the phone to lobby reluctant GOP senators.
Thune said he planned to hold the budget resolution and perhaps use it as a vehicle in September to pass a resolution to continue operations for a short term to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1.
“John Thune, in my experience, wants to pass the SAVE Act. I want to pass the SAVE Act,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-Madisonville, told reporters according to Punchbowl, a news website that focuses on Capitol Hill. “But you can’t make people vote a certain way if they don’t want to vote that way. It’s called democracy.”
