Politics
Long before he took on Trump, Adam Schiff's pursuit of tough justice defined his career
When Rep. Adam B. Schiff stood before the U.S. Senate on the final day of President Trump’s first impeachment trial, he reprised a familiar role: prosecutor.
The former assistant U.S. attorney hadn’t tried a case in more than a decade, but he was surprised how quickly the muscle memory came back. Wearing a crisp blue suit, the Burbank Democrat launched into a lacerating closing argument, trying to convince senators that Trump lacked the integrity, morality and temperament to remain in the White House.
“He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again,” Schiff said. “You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less. And decency matters not at all.”
The Senate ultimately voted to acquit Trump. But Schiff’s leading role in the historic proceeding has become etched in the nation’s political psyche, lionizing him among fellow Democrats, demonizing him among Republicans and seeding his 2024 campaign for the U.S. Senate.
Schiff, a federal prosecutor, campaigned in the 1990s as a law-and-order Democrat, eventually winning a seat in the state Senate.
(David Bohrer / For The Times)
The roots of Schiff’s tough-on-Trump persona go back to the 1990s, when the former federal prosecutor won a seat in the California Legislature as a law enforcement Democrat. In his earliest days in Sacramento, he pushed to increase some penalties, including for young offenders — an approach to criminal justice that is anathema to many progressives today.
Though the pursuit of justice has always been a driving force for Schiff, his attitude toward how justice should be applied, and to whom, has changed. In Congress, he has worked on gun control, police misconduct and investigations into Russia’s support for Trump’s 2016 campaign and into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
His time as a federal prosecutor, the 63-year-old Schiff said this week, taught him “the importance of upholding the rule of law.”
“That’s been a core conviction for me,” he told The Times in a phone interview. “And that training came in much more handy than I would have ever imagined during the era of Trump.”
After the 1993 murder of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old from Petaluma who was kidnapped by a man with a long criminal history, California enacted harsher sentencing requirements. In 1994, Republican Gov. Pete Wilson signed the so-called three-strikes law, which doubled the normal sentence for an offender’s second felony conviction and raised the penalty for a third conviction to 25 years to life. More than 70% of California voters supported the three-strikes law at the ballot box that fall.
Back then, Schiff was working as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. He handled several high-profile cases, including the third trial of Richard Miller, a former FBI agent who was convicted of passing classified documents to the Soviet Union.
Schiff talks with members of Long Beach Firefighters Assn. Local 372 in Signal Hill last weekend.
(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
The experience taught Schiff how to conduct a complicated investigation into a white-collar crime. In a not-too-subtle jab at Trump, Schiff said he also learned the ways of Russian tradecraft, including “how they target people who are of poor moral character, who are philanderers, who are obsessed with money.”
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During his race for the state Senate in 1996, Schiff fought his well-funded Republican opponent’s attempts to paint him as soft on crime. He campaigned on his support for the three-strikes law and the death penalty. His election was a victory for California Democrats, who increased their majority in the Legislature, as well as a personal victory: Schiff had run for office, and lost, three times before.
He arrived in Sacramento in 1997 as the youngest member of the Senate — determined, he said, to deter crime rather than just prosecute crimes that had already been committed.
Nearly 40% of the 142 bills Schiff introduced during his four-year term were related to policing, criminal procedure and public safety, including efforts to stiffen penalties for some offenses by children, to build and renovate juvenile halls, and to expand crime-prevention services for at-risk teenagers, a review of his legislative history shows.
Schiff in 1999, two years after joining the state Senate with the aim of deterring rather than just prosecuting crimes.
(Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The Times)
“Like many Democrats, including President Biden, we wouldn’t strike the same balance today,” Schiff said. “My priority then, and my priority now, has always been to keep Californians safe and keep our communities safe. … Some of the sentencing policies of the ’90s didn’t do much to reduce crime, but they did a lot to increase incarceration. I don’t think that’s the right balance.”
Schiff’s long legislative history is both an advantage and a liability as he vies for an open U.S. Senate seat following the death of Dianne Feinstein. His evolution on criminal justice issues hews with the leftward swing of California Democrats, who have signaled through statewide ballot initiatives and the election of progressive prosecutors that the state’s “tough on crime” era is over.
But after decades of public opinion steadily shifting away from the policies of the ’90s, the pendulum “seems to be swinging slightly back,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican strategist who teaches political communication at USC and UC Berkeley. He pointed to recent debates over changes to Proposition 47, the 10-year-old law that reduced some felonies to misdemeanors — discussions that he said “would not have taken place several years ago.”
If the Senate race had occurred in 2020, amid the nationwide upheaval and demands for criminal justice reform that followed the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, Schiff’s background as a prosecutor and a self-described law enforcement Democrat “might end up being much bigger issues,” Schnur said.
Progressive criminal justice advocates have accused Schiff of pushing policies that were overly punitive, even by the standards of the ’90s.
In early 2021, Schiff supporters began floating his name as a possibility for California attorney general after then-Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra was tapped to become Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services. When criminal justice activists caught wind of the effort, they sent a searing open letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom decrying Schiff’s track record and describing him as “not only supportive of, but deeply invested in, creating our current system of incarceration.” Newsom instead picked state Assemblymember Rob Bonta, an advocate for abolishing the death penalty and eliminating cash bail.
Schiff speaks with community activists in August as he tours Inland Empire neighborhoods affected by giant warehouses.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
But Schiff was far from being out of step with his party, said former San Fernando Valley lawmaker Bob Hertzberg, who chaired the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee at the time. He said Schiff was “middle of the road” among the Democrats of the late ’90s.
“Everybody was doing tough-on-crime stuff. It was a different world,” Hertzberg said. Their constituents were worried about surging crime, fueled in part by the crack cocaine epidemic. In the early ’90s, the city of Los Angeles alone saw more than 1,000 homicides a year.
Some of Schiff’s earliest and most punitive bills didn’t become law, including one that sought to try children as young as 14 as adults in criminal court in murder and rape cases. Nor did a bill that would have required that children who committed serious offenses at school be sent to juvenile detention or military-run “boot camps.”
“He wasn’t just a bystander in the ’90s, getting swept along in the punitive approach to public safety,” said USC law professor Jody Armour. “He was really at the vanguard — one of the leading voices in promoting those kinds of policies.”
Schiff also introduced bills to clarify and expand the state’s three-strikes policy and lift the five-year limit on sentencing enhancements for nonviolent crimes, opening the door to longer prison sentences. Both became law.
In 2000, Schiff’s last year in Sacramento, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signedthe Schiff-Cárdenas Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act. The bill, which set aside $121.3 million annually for local policing and another $121.3 million for programs aimed at curbing youth crime and delinquency, was believed to be the country’s largest source of funding at the time for youth crime prevention and intervention.
Democrats in Sacramento had decided that juvenile justice reform was “an area where the voters would be with us,” even if the state didn’t support overhauling the three-strikes law, said then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa. Efforts to pay for anything other than incarceration were “progressive stuff,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Tony Cárdenas, then a member of the state Assembly representing the San Fernando Valley, said that when he backed juvenile justice reform, some of his colleagues ribbed him for supporting what they called “hug-a-thug” programs. Cárdenas, who has endorsed Schiff in the Senate race, said he wanted Schiff to co-sponsor the bill because his background as a prosecutor would help deflect criticisms that alternatives to incarceration were soft on crime.
Counties used the funding for gang-intervention efforts, drug counseling, mental health screenings and a wide array of other services, including after-school and nonprofit programs. Studies later found that children in those programs were less likely to be arrested or incarcerated and more likely to complete any court-ordered community service.
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As lead manager in former President Trump’s first impeachment trial, Schiff urged senators to convict Trump, saying he “has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again.”
(Senate Television via AP)
Since he arrived in Washington in 2001, after what was then the most expensive House race in history, Schiff has mostly left behind courtroom issues in favor of bills focused on broader law enforcement and criminal justice policies, including police accountability.
In 2011, he pushed the FBI to widen its use of familial DNA — in which investigators trying to identify crime suspects through their genetic material search for potential relatives in government databases. And after a national scandal erupted over a years-long backlog of more than 13,000 rape kits at the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Schiff secured funding to help process them.
As grainy cellphone videos of police shootings began to appear, shocking “the conscience of the country,” Schiff said, he became convinced that the U.S. needed police reform. After Michael Brown was shot to death by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer in 2014, Schiff led members of Congress in pushing for a federal grant program to equip police departments with body-worn cameras.
In the summer of 2020, amid the mass protests calling for criminal justice reform after Floyd was killed by police, Schiff made the rare move of withdrawing his endorsement of then-L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey in her contentious reelection fight against progressive challenger George Gascón. Since his election, Gascón has faced two failed recall attempts. Schiff has not endorsed Gascón’s bid for reelection.
Schiff voted for bills that would have decriminalized marijuana nationally and ended the federal sentencing disparity between drug offenses involving crack and powder cocaine. He was also one of 190 original co-sponsors of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would ban no-knock warrants in federal drug cases and create a national database of complaints and records of police misconduct.
Schiff’s view on the death penalty is among his biggest changes since his days as a federal prosecutor. He said he wrestled with the issue for years and no longer supports capital punishment.
“There was certainly a time when I supported the death penalty for those who killed cops and those who killed kids,” Schiff said this week. But over time, he said, he “came to lose confidence” in how the law was applied, in part because DNA evidence showed that “too many people on death row were innocent,” and because executions disproportionately affected people of color.
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Those difficult issues, however, were not what launched Schiff into national prominence.
Schiff, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, earned both admiration and animosity for his role in Trump’s first impeachment.
(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)
After Democrats took back the House in 2018, he became chairman of the Intelligence Committee. He developed a national profile through his clashes with Trump and regular appearances on cable news shows.
Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Schiff as lead manager of Trump’s first impeachment trial. Democrats had accused Trump of abusing his office when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son Hunter while Trump was withholding crucial military aid. A second article of impeachment accused Trump of obstructing Congress’ investigation into the alleged scheme by refusing to release subpoenaed documents or to allow current and former aides to testify.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), who worked as an impeachment manager alongside Schiff, said he was thorough and professional, and had a “tremendous command of the facts.” Trump’s animosity and the death threats that the team received, she said, “steeled [Schiff] to stand up for the truth.”
Not visible during the televised hearings, Lofgren said, was that Schiff was in excruciating pain due to a dental emergency. Schiff said he alternated between Tylenol and Advil every four hours until he could make it to the dentist for a root canal the weekend before closing arguments. At one point, he recalled, fellow impeachment manager Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) gave him a pep talk: “Hey, this is like an NBA championship. You got to play through the pain.”
Republicans reclaimed the House majority in 2020, and in 2023 removed Schiff from the Intelligence Committee.
He had said publicly that there was “significant” and “compelling” evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin in the 2016 election.
Robert S. Mueller III, the Justice Department’s special counsel in that case, found that Russia had intervened on the Trump campaign’s behalf, and that the campaign had welcomed the help. But Mueller did not recommend that the Justice Department charge any Americans.
Reporters question Schiff in June about Republicans’ move to censure him. “I wear this partisan vote as a badge of honor,” he said after the resolution passed on a party-line vote.
(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
Last year, the GOP-led House voted to censure Schiff, approving a resolution that said he had “misled the American people and brought disrepute upon the House of Representatives.” As then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy read out the vote count — 213 to 209, along party lines — Democrats crowded the House floor, chanting: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Republicans continue to accuse Schiff of being unfit to hold public office. During Senate candidates’ first debate last month, GOP hopeful Steve Garvey told Schiff: “Sir, you lied to 300 million people. You can’t take that back.”
But to Schiff, the censure is proof of a job done right.
After its passage, he rose before his colleagues and said:
“Today, I wear this partisan vote as a badge of honor, knowing that I have lived my oath, knowing that I have done my duty to hold a dangerous and out-of-control president accountable, and knowing that I would do so again, in a heartbeat, if the circumstances should ever require it.”
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Fresh satellite images give a rare aerial view of the damage across Iran after U.S.-Israeli strikes and what Tehran’s retaliation left behind across the region.
Planet Labs satellite imagery captured burning ships and damaged facilities at the Konarak base in southern Iran, as well as significant destruction at Iran’s naval headquarters in Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf, reflecting the scale of the strikes on military infrastructure.
Satellite imagery from Planet Labs shows damage at Konarak naval base in southern Iran, left, and Iran’s Bandar Abbas naval headquarters in the Persian Gulf, right. (Planet Labs PBC)
Imagery from Vantor shows damage to facilities and vessels located in Iran’s Bushehr port in the Persian Gulf.
In addition to naval assets, satellite photos show a bunker at Bushehr air base hit by a strike, leaving a large crater and destroying several nearby small buildings.
More strikes targeted the Choqa Balk drone facility in western Iran.
Radar systems at the Zahedan air base in eastern Iran — near the country’s borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan — were also struck.
The two facilities are about 800 to 900 miles apart, underscoring the broad reach of the coordinated strikes.
Satellite imagery also reveals damage to aircraft on the tarmac at Shiraz air base, including scorch marks and debris around several parking areas.
Side-by-side photos showing damage to aircraft at Shiraz air base in Shiraz, Iran on March 6, 2026. (Vantor/Maxar/Getty Images)
Satellite imagery from Planet Labs shows thick smoke plumes rising above Tehran, signaling explosions and fires inside the Iranian capital.
The smoke underscores how the conflict has moved beyond isolated military sites and into the heart of Iran’s political center.
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A satellite image from Planet Labs shows a plume of smoke above Tehran, Iran, on March 1, 2026. (Planet Labs PBC)
Iran has since responded with missile and drone strikes of its own, expanding the conflict across the region.
Satellite images reveal damage to the port city of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Sharjah is the third most populous after Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
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The Jebel Ali Port, the region’s largest maritime hub, was also targeted, underscoring how the retaliation extended beyond military sites to key infrastructure.
The new satellite imagery comes on the heels of U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several top members of the regime, triggering a succession crisis.
President Donald Trump warned on Sunday that Iran’s new leader is “not going to last long” without U.S. approval as Operation Epic Fury marches into a third week.
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. and Israeli war against Iran entered its ninth day Sunday with no clear path toward de-escalation, as the U.S. announced a seventh American service member had been killed and Iranian state TV reported the selection of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son as his successor.
Meanwhile, the price of oil surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time in 3½ years.
President Trump said deploying American ground troops to the Middle East remains under consideration and Iran’s foreign minister rejected calls for a ceasefire.
Trump said last week that Mojtaba Khamenei would be an “unacceptable” choice to replace his father, the 86-year-old leader who was killed on the first day of U.S. and Israeli attacks. The clerical body in charge of choosing Iran’s next supreme leader selected him anyway, state TV reported Sunday.
The younger Khamenei, a 56-year-old Shiite cleric, has never held government office, but has long been a quiet force within his father’s inner circle. As supreme leader, he will play a central role in deciding Iran’s war strategy moving forward, with the powerful paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps answering to him.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his selection.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Saturday, Trump declined to rule out the possibility of sending U.S. forces inside Iran, saying it could “possibly happen” as the conflict intensifies.
“There would have to be a very good reason,” Trump said. “I would say if we ever did that they would be so decimated that they wouldn’t be able to fight at the ground level.”
His remarks came ahead of another relentless day of bombings in Iran, and as desalination plants critical to civilian water supplies in the arid region came under attack on both sides of the conflict.
The United States military on Sunday announced that an American service member died Saturday night of injuries sustained March 1 in Saudi Arabia during Iran’s “initial attacks” on U.S. allies and facilities across the region, in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes. The service member was not immediately identified, pending notification of family.
In addition to the seven U.S. service members killed in the war, a National Guard soldier died Friday of a “health-related incident” in Kuwait, where he had been deployed, the military said. The cause of death was under review.
Other deaths were also reported in the region. Israel reported two of its soldiers were killed in fighting in southern Lebanon — its first military deaths of the war — while Saudi Arabia reported two people were killed and 12 wounded by a military projectile that fell in a residential area of Al Kharj.
The death toll in Iran has been difficult to nail down, but Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Friday put the number at more than 1,300.
Iran has said it is prepared to continue fighting the war despite sustaining heavy losses and would be ready to fight American ground troops if they set foot in the country.
“We have very brave soldiers who are waiting for any enemy who enters into our soil to fight with them, and to kill them and destroy them,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
Araghchi added that Iran is not considering a ceasefire at this time. He said the United States and Israel would first need to explain “why they started this aggression and then guarantee there would be a permanent end of the war.”
“Unless we get to that, I think we need to continue fighting for the sake of our people and our security,” he said.
Araghchi also pushed back on Trump’s demand last week that the president be involved in determining Iran’s future leadership as a condition to ending the conflict.
“We allow nobody to interfere in our domestic affairs. This is up to the Iranian people to elect their new leader,” Araghchi said. “It’s only the business of the Iranian people, and nobody else’s business.”
In addition to mounting deaths and widespread destruction, the economic toll of the war has also continued to rise, particularly in energy markets — with oil prices jumping above $100 a barrel on Sunday.
“If the war continues like this, there will be neither a way to sell oil nor have the ability to produce it,” Iran’s parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said in a social media post Sunday. He added that the war would affect not just the U.S., but also the rest of the world “due to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s delusions.”
Israeli strikes Sunday hit an oil storage facility in Tehran, marking what appears to be the first time a civil industrial facility has been targeted in the war. Black smoke billowed over the Iranian capital, with officials there warning of the hazardous health effects for residents.
“By targeting fuel depots, the aggressors are releasing hazardous materials and toxic substances into the air, poisoning civilians, devastating the environment, and endangering lives on a massive scale,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said on X.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday that there’s a “fear premium in the marketplace” and sought to assure Americans that the soaring oil prices are a short-term problem.
“We never know exactly the time frame of this,” Wright said in an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But in the worst case, this is a weeks, this is not a months, thing.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed the same message in an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” calling the rising gas prices a “short-term disruption.”
“Ultimately taking out the rogue Iranian regime is going to be a good thing for the oil industry,” Leavitt said. “Those prices are going to come back down just like they have over the course of the past year, because of President Trump’s American energy dominance agenda.”
The strike on the oil storage facility came as Netanyahu promised “many surprises” for the next phase of the conflict.
Israel also claimed Sunday to have destroyed the Tehran headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard air force, which it said operated Iran’s “ballistic missile command, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) array, and other air force units.” It also said it had killed five top commanders in the Revolutionary Guard who were “hiding in a civilian hotel” in central Beirut, Lebanon.
Crucial civilian infrastructure also came under attack, on both sides of the conflict.
Bahrain denounced what it said was an Iranian attack on one of its desalination plants — facilities that supply water to millions of people in the parched deserts of the Persian Gulf. Araghchi said a U.S. airstrike had damaged an Iranian desalination plan on Qeshm Island first.
“Attacking Iran’s infrastructure is a dangerous move with grave consequences. The U.S. set this precedent, not Iran,” Araghchi wrote on X.
The United States has also come under scrutiny after evidence suggested that an American strike was probably responsible for an explosion at an Iranian elementary school that killed more than 165 people, most of them children.
Trump administration officials have said that the matter is under investigation and that no determination has been made as to who was responsible for the strike. But on Saturday, Trump said Iran was to blame for the explosion.
“It was done by Iran,” he told reporters. “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Asked Sunday whether Iran had any evidence that the strike was conducted by the Americans, Araghchi said that it had to have been either the U.S. or Israeli military and that Trump’s suggestion that Iran was responsible for the attack was “funny.”
“It is our school, these are our students and our girls, and they are attacked by an American fighter, a jet fighter, and they have been killed. Why [is] Iran responsible?” Araghchi said.
Other world leaders and nations have called for a halt to fighting and added their own estimates to its toll.
Lebanon said more than half a million people have been displaced by the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
French President Emmanuel Macron said he had spoken with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Sunday, and urged him to stop strikes in the region. Macron is the first Western leader to speak with Pezeshkian since the war began, the Associated Press reported.
Pope Leo XIV wrote on X on Sunday that reports out of Iran and the wider Middle East “continue to cause deep dismay and raise the fear that the conflict will expand, and that other countries in the region, including dear Lebanon, may once again sink into instability.”
He asked the world to pray “for the roar of bombs to cease, weapons to fall silent, and space to open for dialogue, in which people’s voices may be heard.”
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President Donald Trump is vowing to reject signing any new bills into law until the SAVE America Act is passed by the Senate, a tall order with just 53 Republicans seated and the 60-vote filibuster threshold a high hurdle.
“Great Job by hard working Scott Pressler on Fox & Friends talking about using the Filibuster, or Talking Filibuster, in order to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, an 88% issue with ALL VOTERS,” Trump wrote Sunday morning on Truth Social. “It must be done immediately.”
“It supersedes everything else,” Trump added. “MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE.”
The vow to halt all new law signings is a new one coming from the White House and notable because of the Senate hesitation to follow the urgings of Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to force the Senate to bring the bill forward through the talking filibuster.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, talks with a guest during an “Only Citizens Vote Bus Tour” rally in Upper Senate Park to urge Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed,” Trump’s post continued, “AND NOT THE WATERED DOWN VERSION – GO FOR THE GOLD: MUST SHOW VOTER I.D. & PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP: NO MAIL-IN BALLOTS EXCEPT FOR MILITARY – ILLNESS, DISABILITY, TRAVEL: NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS: NO TRANSGENDER MUTILIZATION FOR CHILDREN! DO NOT FAIL!!!”
While Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has publicly acknowledged a willingness to bring a vote on the SAVE America Act before the upper chamber, there is hesitation within the Republican Party about forcing the talking filibuster under the current Senate rules.
The talking filibuster would force Democrats to speak on the Senate floor to argue against a voter identification position widely supported by Americans, as Trump noted, but it would also force Republicans to sit in attendance with a quorum. That has been rebuked by longtime Senate GOP veterans as something that would “waste time.”
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Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has promised to bring the SAVE America Act to the Senate floor, but there remains some GOP hesitation on forcing the talking filibuster. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Former Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has been publicly opposed to forcing a talking filibuster because of the time constraints it would force on the Senate GOP, and he remains one of the few Senate Republicans not signing on to support the SAVE America Act.
Another development that clouds the SAVE America Act filibuster is the recent appointment of Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., to serve as the next Department of Homeland Security secretary, perhaps resigning from the Senate by the end of March.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mullin’s office for comment. McConnell’s office declined to comment on Trump’s Truth Social vow to block all new law signings amid the standoff on the DHS funding that has the government in a partial shutdown and the Senate sitting on the House-passed SAVE America Act.
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“We’re going to have a vote on this, but in terms of what the president is willing to sign, Maria, we need to get the Department of Homeland Security funded,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wy., told Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
“The Democrats have blocked that right now. And the greatest threat to the American people today is terrorism. So I want to make sure that the Democrats work with us to pass and fund the Department of Homeland Security, because I’m worried about the lone wolf, the sleeper cells and the cyber terrorism that’s coming our way because of what Iran is telling people around the world to do to continue this reign of terror,” Barrasso said.
Getting to 60 votes in the Senate is unlikely with just Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., as the lone potential Democrat vote to side with the Senate GOP on the SAVE America Act.
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Senate GOP WHIP John Barrasso, R-Wy., and current Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., have expressed more support for forcing Democrats to filibuster the SAVE America Act than former GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. (Getty Images)
“The Democrats are against so many of the things that I think help this country,” Barrasso added to Bartiromo. “They’d rather stand with illegal immigrant criminals than with the safety and security of the American people. I want to get the Save act to the floor. I want to have a vote.”
“That’s the next step on this need to get the Department of Homeland Security open and funded,” he continued. “The Democrats are bowing to the liberal left: The people that want to eliminate ICE, the people that want open borders again, and the people that really aren’t looking out for the best interest of the American people.
“As the president said in the State of the Union, it is the first duty of the American government to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. But that’s what not one single Democrat stood up for that when every Republican stood and cheered loudly.”
Barrasso, the Senate GOP member whipping up support, considers the SAVE America Act “common sense.”
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“You want to make sure that only citizens can vote,” he concluded to Bartiromo. “You want to make sure that when people show up, they have a photo ID to prove they are who they say they are. You need a you need a photo ID to buy a beer, to board a plane, all of those things. And it’s 90% popular with the American people. The only people against this are the Democrats because they want to make it easier to cheat.”
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