President Donald Trump's push to enact the SAVE America Act before the midterms is fracturing his own party on both sides of the Capitol. Sen.

Thom Tillis, R-N.C., declared the bill "dead" this week, saying no state could stand up new registration and voter ID rules before Nov. 3 even if the Senate somehow found 60 votes.

In the House, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., has ground the floor to a halt, and Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has quietly conceded he does not have the votes for the mail-ballot crackdown Trump is demanding.

The underlying bill, H.R. 7296, would amend the National Voter Registration Act to require documentary proof of citizenship at registration and photo identification to cast a federal ballot.

A narrower version cleared the House 218-213 in February as an amendment to S. 1383. It has since stalled in the Senate, where Republicans hold 53 seats and would need at least seven Democrats to break a filibuster.

None has signaled openness, and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has branded the bill "Jim Crow 2.0."

Tillis, who is not seeking reelection, told The News and Observer the math is only half the problem.

"Unless they do the work to get to the 60 votes, they know it's dead, and so all this is theater," he said, noting that North Carolina needed a full year to implement its own voter ID law and that the SAVE Act arrives with "no funding" and "no specific implementation instructions."

He was one of four Republicans, with Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who sank an amendment by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to graft Trump's preferred version onto a reconciliation package.

The Senate parliamentarian has separately ruled the bill ineligible for reconciliation.

In the House, Luna has turned that Senate reality into a floor blockade, voting down procedural rules to force leaders to attach the SAVE Act to any must-pass vehicle.

"So yes, 1,000%, the rule will go down until you attach the SAVE America Act. I don't care who in this chamber hates me for it," she wrote on X.

Johnson tried to appease her with a "MIRV" maneuver, merging the bill with the NDAA after passage; Luna rejected it, arguing that the Senate would strip the language.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., called the tactic "dumb" and its authors "low-IQ strategists."

The deeper problem for the president is that the version he wants cannot pass the House either.

Trump has demanded a near-total ban on no-excuse mail voting alongside prohibitions on transgender athletes in women's sports and gender-affirming surgeries for minors.

In the Oval Office this week, he called the mail restriction "maybe the most important of all, because it's so corrupt."

Johnson told Politico he would do "everything I can with the vote tallies that we have," acknowledging that mail voting is "a very difficult thing to regulate at the federal level, because different states do it differently."

Rank-and-file Republicans from rural and mail-heavy states are the sticking point.

Rep. Julie Fedorchak, R-N.D., supports the bill but rejects a blanket ban, citing counties with a single polling place.

Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., said absentee ballots "are not a bad thing historically" when properly safeguarded.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told colleagues at a lunch with Trump that the expanded package lacked Senate GOP consensus, according to notes reviewed by Politico.

The Supreme Court on June 29 ruled 5-4 in Watson v. Republican National Committee that federal law does not bar states from counting mail ballots postmarked by Election Day, blunting a parallel Trump executive order on the same question.

The collateral damage is piling up.

Trump has refused to sign the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act until the Senate moves the SAVE Act. The NDAA is stuck.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has ruled out ending the filibuster, and House leaders sent members home for recess Tuesday without a vote.

Tillis, unmoved, urged colleagues to drop the fight and instead campaign on the economy.