On Friday, June 26, Tennessee Congressman John Rose went on Newsmax with a demand. He wants the U.S. Senate to come back from its break and pass the SAVE America Act right away.

"I don't think there is any piece of legislation before the Congress that's more important than SAVE America," Rose said. He told senators to "fold up their beach towels and come home" and get it done.

Rose is running for governor of Tennessee. So it's worth asking a simple question: what does the bill he cares about more than anything else actually do? The answer is that it would make it harder for regular Americans — maybe including you — to register to vote.

What the SAVE Act really does

The SAVE Act would require every person to show a document that proves U.S. citizenship, in person, before they can register to vote in a federal election. That sounds simple. It is not.

Most people do not carry around a passport or an official birth certificate. About half of Americans don't have a passport at all. The bill leans heavily on birth certificates and passports as proof — and that's where the trouble starts.

The biggest problem is for married women. When a woman gets married and takes her husband's last name, her birth certificate no longer matches her current legal name. The Center for American Progress found that as many as 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate with their current name on it. Under the SAVE Act, that mismatch could stop them from registering.

We're not guessing about this. Kansas tried a proof-of-citizenship rule like this one. The result? It blocked roughly 31,000 eligible citizens — about 12% of all the people trying to register — from signing up to vote. A court later threw the law out. The rule kept far more real citizens from voting than it ever caught noncitizens.

The League of Women Voters, which has helped Americans register to vote for more than 100 years, calls the SAVE Act "a trick." It would hit rural voters, older voters, working people, and anyone who doesn't have hundreds of dollars and a free weekday to track down the right paperwork.

You can read the bill yourself. H.R. 22 is the SAVE Act in the current Congress.

A solution to a problem that doesn't exist

Rose says proof-of-citizenship for voting "absolutely should be a bipartisan issue" and called it "common sense."

Here's what he leaves out: it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and it almost never happens. Study after study has found noncitizen voting to be vanishingly rare — a few cases out of millions and millions of ballots. The SAVE Act is a fix for a problem that barely exists, sold with a story about fraud that the facts don't back up.

So why push so hard for it? Because the real effect isn't catching the tiny number of noncitizens. The real effect is throwing up a paperwork wall that knocks eligible American citizens off the rolls. When fewer people can register, that helps some politicians and hurts voters. Rose is on the side that benefits.

The House already passed the bill, 220 to 208, almost entirely along party lines. It then stalled in the Senate. That's the "beach towels" Rose is mad about.

This isn't new for John Rose

Rose isn't just along for the ride on this one. Back home in Tennessee, he's been running a radio ad bragging that he voted for the SAVE Act three times and pushing the Senate to act. Making it harder to vote is something he wants you to thank him for.

And it fits a pattern. This is the same John Rose who tried to throw out votes that had already been cast.

Just hours after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Rose voted to overturn Joe Biden's win, objecting to the certified electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania. He also signed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to toss out the election results in four states he didn't even live in. You can see his full record on our report card.

Put it together and the picture is clear. When millions of Americans voted and Rose didn't like the outcome, he tried to cancel their votes. Now he wants to make it harder for Americans to register in the first place. The SAVE Act and the Big Lie come from the same place: the idea that the wrong people are voting, and somebody needs to stop them.

Who John Rose is really working for

A governor is supposed to make life easier for the people of his state — not harder. Rose's signature cause does the opposite. It would put a new burden on Tennessee's married women, its rural residents, its seniors, and its working families, all to solve a problem that the evidence says isn't real.

He had time to go on national TV and tell senators to come back from the beach. He has time to run radio ads about it back home. What he doesn't have is a good answer for the eligible Tennesseans his bill would push off the voter rolls.

When a politician's top priority is making it harder to vote, believe him.

Source

This post was prompted by Rose's June 26, 2026 appearance on Newsmax, "Rep. John Rose to Newsmax: Senate Must Pass SAVE America Act."