Senate Faces Challenges Passing SAVE America Act Amid Trump Criticism
Paralysis in the Senate Is Not a Bug, It Is the Regime Defending Itself
The SAVE America Act died the ordinary death of reforms that lack arms, while its authors mistook noise, pressure, and an all-nighter for real power.
A chaotic all-nighter in the Senate that ends with the SAVE America Act “on the shelf” is not chaos to me; it is a regime behaving according to its nature. The president demands passage of the act and even the abolition of the filibuster. The Senate leader replies that such things were from the beginning “difficult if not impossible — frankly more impossible.” Meanwhile, senators boast that they will get some bill to the president’s desk on college athletics, and the chamber still finds the discipline to confirm an acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, despite resistance. Look at the effectual truth: where the regime feels real necessity, it moves; where it does not, it performs.
When I wrote in *The Prince*, in W. K. Marriott’s translation, that men judge “more by the eyes than by the hands,” I had in mind precisely such spectacles. The president criticizes the Senate leader in public; an ally explains this as a tactic to put “pressure” on him. Another senator castigates the chamber for going on recess without passing the SAVE Act and urges the newly confirmed Blanche to prosecute some adversary. These actors understand that in a large republic, to be seen exerting maximum effort matters nearly as much as success, because most citizens will remember the noise, not the roll call.
Pressure, however, is not power. In the *Discourses on Livy*, as translated by Ninian Hill Thomson, I observed that unarmed prophets fail and armed ones succeed. Arms today are not pikes but votes, rules, coalitions, and the credible threat to change them. Here the decisive arm is the 60‑vote hurdle. The Senate leader openly calls this “the reality I have to deal with,” pointing to Democratic opposition on the substance and Republican opposition to lowering the threshold. Anyone who begins with speeches instead of these numbers is like a captain debating tactics after his men have thrown down their shields.
Notice also where the leadership spends its limited virtù. It does not burn its strength to ram through the SAVE America Act or to abolish the filibuster. It spends it to confirm Blanche, securing the state’s legal sword, and to avert a shutdown by engineering a deal that bundles “major items” and seeks guaranteed votes. That deal itself faces resistance from within the same faction, for differing reasons. This, too, is ordinary. The first duty of a leader is to maintain the state; therefore he will always choose the fight that threatens immediate disorder over the one that merely promises future advantage. The budget keeps the lights on; a voting reform can wait on the shelf.
Some will call this cowardice. I call it the middle course typical of a senate jealous of its forms. The leader’s ally hints that the president’s criticism “could change after the election.” This is the language of men who assume that noise before a vote is theater and that, once the danger passes, actors reconcile around the old arrangements. I saw the same in Florence: the great like to be shouted at in public so long as the shouting makes them stronger in private. To endure a beating in words is little, if by enduring it one preserves the filibuster, the 60‑vote shield, and one’s own chair.
The deeper sickness is not that the SAVE America Act failed, but that no one seems to know how to make any great reform succeed. The Senate’s order is mixed: leaders, factions, and the people all pull at once. In a healthy republic, such tumults are channeled by clear outlets — tribunes, assemblies, periodic appeals to the people — so that conflict renews the laws. Here, appetites clash against procedures that almost no one dares to alter. The president demands boldness; the leader cites rules; backbenchers posture; the chamber recesses. A mixed order without a path for extraordinary decision produces not balance, but stalemate.
Thus I judge this episode not as an accident but as the natural offspring of these institutions and these men. A president who treats appearances and pressure as arms discovers that they do not pierce the armor of a rule requiring 60 votes. A Senate leader who lives to say “that’s the reality I have to deal with” preserves his position and the old dykes but cannot build new channels. A reform without its own arms remains an orphan in the storm. Where no one risks their regime to found new modes and orders, the old modes smother every act in its cradle.
From the works cited
- The Prince — Appearances are a hard currency of power: most people judge by the eyes rather than the hands, by results rather than processes. Analyze reputation, ceremony, and narrative as assets on the balance sheet, not as decoration.
- The Prince — Ask what the actor's survival incentives are before asking what morality requires: a leader's first imperative is to maintain the state, and you must expect them to do what maintenance demands. The interesting question is whether they do it skilfully.
- Discourses on Livy — No reform survives without arms of its own: ask of every noble plan, 'what are its arms?' Unarmed prophets fail; armed ones succeed. 'Arms' today may mean coalitions, revenues, and enforcement as much as soldiers — but something must be able to defend the new order against those the old order fed.