(Daily Signal)—Ahead of the August recess, Senate Republicans remain divided over how to proceed with the SAVE America Act, legislation championed by President Donald Trump that aims to ban mail-in ballots and require identification and proof of citizenship for voters.
In response to a Daily Signal questionnaire sent to all Republican Senate offices, staunch allies of the president, such as Sens. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, reaffirmed the president’s call for the chamber to remain in session until it passes the legislation, rather than adjourn for its scheduled August recess. Others stated their support for the SAVE America Act but did not specifically address the recess or Trump’s call for the chamber to abolish the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold to end debate and pass legislation. With the filibuster, the legislation would need Democrat support to pass.
“The Senate has done NOTHING to deserve a five-week break,” Tuberville told the Daily Signal. “Other than the ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill,’ all the Senate has done is pass bills rebuking Trump and giving Democrats handouts. Our job is to deliver RESULTS for the American people.”
SAVE’s Current Status
Pieces of the legislation were attached to several measures that passed the House last week but have yet to receive a vote in the Senate.
Most notably, components are included in the budget resolution that is a framework for a Senate bill. That spending measure could pass the Senate through the special process of reconciliation, reserved for certain budget-related measures and requiring only majority support for passage. However, while the language in the resolution allows individual states to access billions in federal funding if they “opt in” to a voting integrity program, it would not mandate national voter ID and proof of citizenship to vote, as does the actual SAVE America Act.
That process also might encounter obstacles from certain Republican senators. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told the Daily Signal that language Trump requested might create certain problems for some Republicans.
“For some people it does,” Cassidy says. “For [Sen.] Mitch McConnell, it would.”
“[Sen.] Lisa Murkowski has made it clear she doesn’t favor his [Trump’s] current iteration, as it would forbid mail-in ballots, which is very important in Alaska,” Cassidy continued.
Other components of the voter integrity legislation have been included in larger packages, such as the National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump considered a “must-pass” bill. However, the act would require the customary 60 votes to pass.
Conservatives Willing to Go to Great Lengths
In a statement to the Daily Signal, Lee said he is “proud to lead the charge to stay in Washington and work for Americans until the SAVE America Act is passed,” while acknowledging that only “a handful” of senators have joined his effort to postpone the August recess.
“We are working on multiple avenues to pass the SAVE America Act, and this is one of them,” the senator continued. “Stay tuned.”
Lee said that portions of the legislation may need to be passed separately before being combined together. Regarding the threat of the filibuster, Lee said he supports forcing a procedure known as a talking filibuster to advance the SAVE America Act, but noted that reconciliation could provide a path to pass key provisions of the bill.
Tuberville said he plans to join Lee in opposing any motion to adjourn for the August recess. He called on the majority leader to abolish the Senate’s “traditions,” referring to the filibuster. The American people “didn’t vote for a Republican party obsessed with preserving their own power through the manufactured filibuster,” he said.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., also voiced support for remaining in session.
“I’m in support of the SAVE Act. We have to get it on the floor and we have to get it done, and if that means going into August I’m supportive of that,” Schmitt said.
A Schmitt spokesman told the Daily Signal the senator is a co-sponsor of the SAVE America Act and has repeatedly voted for the legislation.
Reagan McCarthy, communications director for Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, told the Daily Signal that the senator “is a Day One, unapologetic supporter of the SAVE America Act” and supports remaining in Washington “as long as it takes.”
Similarly, the office of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., pointed the Daily Signal to recent public statements in which he blamed Senate Democrats for delaying the legislation and urged Republicans to find a way to pass the law.
Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., stated on X, “Hoosiers are asking me if I would support canceling the Senate’s August recess to pass the Save Act? My answer is yes.”
A spokesperson for Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, told the Daily Signal that the senator “believes that the Senate needs to do what it takes to pass the Save America Act,” although he did not specifically address whether he supports abolishing the filibuster or canceling recess.
While the Daily Signal could not reach Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., for comment, the senator announced that she supports staying in Washington as “long as necessary.”
Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla.; Ashley Moody, R-Fla.; and Jim Banks, R-Ind. all made statements on X that the Senate should pass the legislation before leaving for recess.
During an appearance on CBS over the weekend, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., called on the majority leader to delay the recess.
Republicans Wary of Changes to Filibuster, Recess, Election Reform
At a Wednesday press conference, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters he is “for anything that we can do to get the SAVE America Act passed.” However, he said he does not believe keeping senators in Washington through August would change the outcome of Democrats’ refusal to support the bill.
Thune added that he does not believe he could secure the 50 Republican votes needed to abolish the legislative filibuster.
“There aren’t going to be 50 votes to get rid of the legislative filibuster,” Thune said on Wednesday.
While Sens. McConnell, R-Ky.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; Thom Tillis, R-N.C.; and Murkowski, R-Alaska, did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment, the four previously voted against an effort by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham to attach the SAVE America Act to a budget reconciliation package that passed the Senate in June.
At the time, Tillis explained that any effort to implement the election reform law before the 2026 midterms would create turmoil in states across the country as they changed voting rules so close to an election.
In addition to Murkowski, Kennedy, Moody, Sullivan, Collins, Cassidy, Scott, McConnell, Thune, and Tillis, the following Senate offices did not respond to the Daily Signal’s requests for comment by the time of publication: Rand Paul, R-Ky.; Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; John Cornyn, R-Texas; Mike Rounds, R-S.D.; Mike Crapo, R-Idaho; Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; Tim Scott, R-S.C.; Katie Britt, R-Ala.; Jim Justice, R-W.Va.; Pete Ricketts, R-Neb.; Tom Cotton, R-Ark.; Joni Ernst, R-Iowa; Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.; Josh Hawley, R-Mo.; John Hoeven, R-N.D.; Jon Husted, R-Ohio; Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss.; James Lankford, R-Okla.; Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo.; Roger Marshall, R-Kan.; Dave McCormick, R-Pa.; Jerry Moran, R-Kan.; James Risch, R-Idaho; Tim Sheehy, R-Mont.; and Roger Wicker, R-Miss.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
