Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, his state's Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, told Newsmax that the country is one election cycle away from losing the faith and freedom that built it, and that the only way to protect future elections is to gut the Senate filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act.

He spoke at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's Road to Majority conference in Washington, where President Donald Trump headlined on Friday in his first return to the Washington Hilton since the April shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Paxton's appearance on Saturday Agenda landed roughly a month into a general-election race that has tightened sharply.

A University of Texas at Austin poll released last week put Paxton at 43% to Democratic nominee James Talarico's 42% among 1,200 registered voters, with a 3.5-point margin of error.

The country's founders built America on faith and freedom, Paxton said, "and we've lasted for 250 years."

His warning followed: "If we don't guard against the left taking it from us, we will lose this country, and that foundation will be gone, and this country will not be great."

He moved on to cast the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections, as the linchpin.

The bill passed the House 218-213 in February and has stalled in the Senate, where Republicans hold 53 seats and need 60 to break a filibuster.

"If we do not get rid of the filibuster, we will never pass a [Save] America Act," Paxton said. "And if we can't pass that, we can't protect elections."

He acknowledged the trade-off, having served in both chambers of the Texas Legislature: "I understand it protects the minority from the majority."

But he argued the cost is higher. "Slowly but surely, as we lose a state here or there, the Democrats are progressive.

They change the rules, making it difficult for us to hold fair elections."

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has said repeatedly there are neither the votes to scrap the filibuster nor 10 Democrats willing to back the bill.

Cornyn, before losing the May 26 runoff to Paxton with 63.8% of the vote, called the push to pass it via talking filibuster a "fantasy."

On his own race, Paxton predicted James Talarico cannot survive Texas voters seeing his record.

"When he ran in the Democratic primary, he just recently took a lot of these very woke leftist-type positions.

And now that he's in a general election, he knows from polling that he can't win by believing the things or saying the things that he said.

So he's trying to run from those. He's scrubbing them. But you know what? It oozes out. He can't help it."

Talarico, a former middle school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, has built his general-election message around Paxton's 2023 impeachment by the Republican-led Texas House on bribery and corruption charges, for which Paxton was acquitted by the state Senate.

Paxton tied the urgency back to faith.

Strip the country of it, he said, "then Marxist, totalitarian, socialist type governments thrive. They depend on the governments to sort of be the god of the people."

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