Hello and welcome to the Punch Bull News Readback podcast. I'm your host, congressional reporter Max Cohen.

And today I'm joined by Laura Weiss, who's here to talk about all things, Senate, Save Act, and much more.

Laura, how you doing?

I'm good. How are you, Max?

I'm good. We're recording this on Friday afternoon,

and the Senate is threatening to be in for a weekend session, which is never fun for anyone involved,

but we're here to talk about why. So, Laura, tell us exactly what's going on and why are they

maybe going to be here the next couple of days. Yeah, so the Senate's here for the weekend because they're considering the Save America Act.

It's the voter ID and proof of citizenship bill that President Trump really wants

and that the MAGA based and conservative Republicans on the Hill are like really, really worked up about.

And basically,

they're doing this process where there's this extended floor debate on the bill. The idea here is to kind of satisfy those Republicans who really want this, show Republicans are fighting

for it, and make, you know, Democrats go on the record on, on this bill in the end,

but it's ultimately expected to fail because eventually there will need to be a vote at a 60-vote threshold.

You know, Senator, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said repeatedly there just aren't the votes at this point to nuke the filibuster essentially. So that's why we're here.

In the meantime, the Senate is working on, I'd say two other big things. One is DHS funding.

The shutdown has now been going on for over a month. You know, there are long lines at TSA. You know, it's

getting, seemingly getting really quite bad, this shutdown. And so there's been sort of an

uptick the last couple days in the talks, bipartisan meeting yesterday on Thursday with Tom

Homan, the Borders are, and a group of bipartisan

senators. They're meeting again today. So we'll see how that goes on Friday. Maybe there will be more

when you're hearing this that we'll have reported, so we'll see. But that's all kind of going on. And then also,

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