I’ve been admittedly skeptical that the current effort to pass the SAVE America Act will succeed. I want it to pass. Desperately. And from where I sit, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t pass. But we all know why something so popular and commonsense can’t get to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature. Democrats in Congress don’t want election integrity and are fighting against it like their power is on the line.

Despite my skepticism, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), the lead sponsor of the bill, is confident the SAVE America Act is going to pass — and after just six days of debate, Democrats may already be looking for a way out.

As you know, the bill does two things. It requires proof of citizenship when registering to vote and a voter ID when casting a ballot. Polls repeatedly show that Americans overwhelmingly support these ideas, regardless of political party or race.

And Sen. Lee knows it, too.

“Americans overwhelmingly believe that voters in the United States, you need to be US citizens,” Lee said. “So our bill does two things in order to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”

The fight right now isn’t really about the merits. Let’s be honest about that. It’s about the Senate’s cloture threshold, the 60-vote supermajority needed to end debate and move to a final vote. Republicans don’t have those numbers on their own, which means they need Democrats to break ranks. Lee’s strategy is to make them do exactly that, and he’s drawing on a historical playbook to get it done.

“We’re using a playbook that in a slightly different form was used in 1964 to overcome a cloture gap of thirty-two votes,” Lee said, referring to the landmark Civil Rights Act debate.