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Hey, Senate Republicans – Pass the SAVE America Act. Do It for Lindsey Graham. Do It for America.

POLITICS

Lindsey Graham’s last phone call was to the President of the United States. He had just landed from Ukraine. He was tired. He called anyway — because he wanted to talk about the SAVE America Act.

That’s who he was. That’s what mattered to him in the final hours of his life. And if the Republican Senate has any intention of honoring his memory with something more lasting than a floor speech and a moment of silence, then the path forward is clear: pass the bill he co-sponsored, championed, and was pushing until the moment he died.

Senator Mike Lee said it plainly on Fox News Sunday: “One of the best ways we could honor Lindsey Graham’s legacy would be to take this up and pass it this month.” He’s right. And unlike most things said on Sunday morning political shows, this one comes with the weight of genuine urgency behind it.

The SAVE America Act is not complicated legislation. It requires proof of citizenship to register to vote. It requires photo ID to cast a ballot. That’s it. Two requirements that roughly 80% of Americans support — Democrats and Republicans alike, as polling has consistently shown. Two requirements that virtually every other functioning democracy on earth already mandates. Two requirements that the left has spent years hysterically comparing to Jim Crow, because they know exactly what honest elections do to their electoral math.

Graham co-sponsored this bill. He lobbied for it. He called the president about it the night he died. The least the Senate can do is finish what he started.

Senator Lee has identified multiple paths to passage — attaching it to a must-pass vehicle, bringing it to the floor for a full debate, or threading pieces of it through budget reconciliation. He’s right that any of these would work. What won’t work is continuing the pattern of the last several months: a 53-seat Republican majority that can’t find 51 votes for the most important election security legislation in a generation, while Democrats publicly announce they’ll kill the filibuster and federalize elections in their favor the moment they take back power.

Here is the cold, practical reality that grief cannot obscure: with Graham gone, Republicans just lost a guaranteed yes vote on the SAVE America Act — at least until South Carolina’s special election produces a replacement. The margin for error in the Senate was already razor-thin. It just got thinner.

That’s not a reason to give up. It’s a reason to move faster.

Graham wasn’t the kind of man who accepted delay as an answer when something needed to be done. He flew to Kyiv ten times during a war. He made phone calls from exhaustion. He worked until there was nothing left to give.

The Senate can honor that legacy with floor speeches. Or it can honor it with legislation.

One of those things lasts. Pass the SAVE America Act. This month. For Lindsey. For America.