U.S. Senate Democrats introduced legislation on Thursday to require Congress to sign off on any deployment of federal troops to the polls, as President Donald Trump and his administration refuse to rule out the idea.

Fears of troops or other federal agents at voting sites have long loomed over the approaching midterm elections in November. Democrats and voting rights advocates have grown alarmed in recent months as Trump has publicly entertained the possibility. Other administration officials have mocked or sidestepped questions about possible deployments.

The legislation, the Protect Our Polls Act, would require Congress to pass a resolution approving any deployment beforehand. Federal law prohibits troops and other armed federal personnel from polling places, but contains an exception to “repel armed enemies of the United States” — fueling speculation that Trump could invoke this exception to bypass the ban.

“He is trying to nationalize the elections and he is telling us in his own words what he is trying to do,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, said at a news conference at the Capitol. “On top of that, Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet positions have come up here and refused to rule out uniformed military or federal law enforcement being sent to the polls on Election Day.”

White House justification

The bill would require the White House, 48 hours before any deployment, to provide Congress with intelligence, legal justifications, deployment plans and evidence that state and local officials are unable to address the threat themselves. 

It also prohibits military personnel from using federal funds to access election records, a provision designed to block troops from seizing ballots.

Slotkin is offering the bill alongside Sens. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Alex Padilla of California, Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

“One of the things I’m very proud of is that I served to protect the Constitution of the United States and our democracy,” said Gallego, a Marine veteran. “I swore that oath, and the last thing any Marine, sailor, Army, Coastie, Air Force, spacemen — whatever they call them nowadays — wants to do is to undermine that. We’re here to protect democracy, we’re not here to undermine democracy.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that if Democrats “really cared about securing our elections,” the party would pass the SAVE America Act. 

The legislation would require voters to provide documents, such as a birth certificate or passport, proving their citizenship. The measure has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and a handful of Republicans.

In May, Trump told reporters that he would “do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” in response to questions about sending National Guard personnel or federal immigration agents to voting locations in November.

Amendments blocked

At a Senate hearing in April, Slotkin pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on sending troops to the polls. He called the questions “another gotcha hypothetical.”

The Democratic legislation comes a week after Slotkin said Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee blocked two amendments to ban troops at the polls during work on the National Defense Authorization Act. The committee typically works on the defense spending bill behind closed doors.

The Protect Our Polls Act has virtually no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress. Still, its introduction underscores the level of concern among Democrats as Trump’s efforts to influence the midterm elections come into focus.

The Department of Justice has spent a year demanding states turn over unredacted copies of their voter rolls, including sensitive personal data on voters. DOJ officials have said in court that the department wants to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security, which operates a powerful computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. 

The DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the data, but no judge has so far ruled in the administration’s favor.

Investigations

The Department of Justice is also engaged in several election-related investigations over past elections. 

The FBI raided a Georgia elections warehouse in January and seized ballots from the 2020 election. Election officials have been subpoenaed in Minneapolis and the FBI last week searched the office of an Ohio voting rights group.

And Trump signed an executive order that restricts voting by mail. It would require states to provide lists of voters to the U.S. Postal Service before using the mail to send ballots and directs Homeland Security to share lists of voting-age citizens with every state. The order remains in effect for now, despite a series of lawsuits challenging it.

“There’s a common theme here,” Padilla said at a Democratic forum on election security on Tuesday. “All of these things are illegal and many unconstitutional.”

WASHINGTON — A group of U.S. Senate Democrats has sent a letter to the head of the Congressional Budget Office, asking him to include outside projections for the cost of the Iran war in the agency’s official cost estimate. 

“The American people deserve to know the true costs of this conflict, and they deserve transparency and honesty when their government commits the nation to war,” the senators wrote in the May 27 letter to the nonpartisan agency. “Your timely and comprehensive estimate of the immediate and long-term budgetary consequences will help ensure that the Iran war remains subject to rigorous and appropriate legislative oversight.”

House Budget Committee ranking member Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., sent a letter to the CBO in early March, asking the agency to estimate what the conflict would cost “under several scenarios, including scenarios of the war lasting longer than 4 to 5 weeks and deploying U.S. troops on the ground in Iran.” 

The senators’ letter asks CBO Director Phillip Swagel to “take into consideration the significant divergence between the administration’s public estimates and those produced by independent analysts and investigative journalists.”

The senators wrote that while Pentagon officials said in mid-May they believed the war had cost about $29 billion, other estimates placed its total costs much higher. 

“It is essential that Congress and the American public receive accurate, comprehensive estimates of the costs of the war in Iran,” they wrote. 

Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, California Sen. Alex Padilla, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, Connecticut Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, Maryland Sens. Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen, Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Andy Kim, New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Oregon Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, Vermont Sen. Peter Welch and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine all signed the letter. 

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that Democrats will use the unlimited number of amendment votes they are allowed on Republicans’ budget resolution to illustrate policy differences on cost-of-living issues and immigration activities. 

“We are for reducing costs for the American people, whether it’s housing or whether it’s health care or whether it’s electric costs or whether it’s groceries or whether it’s child care,” he said. “And they are funding a rogue police force that is not even popular with the American people.”

Republicans voted Tuesday to begin debate on their budget resolution, which holds instructions that would allow the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee as well as the Judiciary Committee to each write a bill that spends up to $70 billion on immigration enforcement. 

Amendment debate could begin Wednesday or Thursday, followed by a simple majority vote to approve the budget resolution, sending it to the House.  

GOP leaders are using the same complex budget reconciliation process they used last year to enact their “big, beautiful” law to approve three years of funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. The earlier bill, enacted last July, included $170 billion to bolster the administration’s immigration activities. 

The House and Senate must vote to adopt the budget resolution before they can use the reconciliation process to approve a bill without having to garner 60 votes in the Senate to end debate.

Spending on those two agencies would normally run through the annual Homeland Security government funding bill. But that process stalled earlier this year when Democrats demanded new constraints on immigration activities after federal officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis. 

Negotiations between Republicans and Democrats moved rather slowly and contributed to a record-setting shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security, which began in mid-February. 

President Donald Trump urged GOP lawmakers to vote against any Democratic amendments in a social media post.

“The Radical Left Democrats, and their so-called ‘Leader,’ Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, one of the most incompetent Senators in American History, will try to offer ‘Amendments’ during this process to divide Republicans,” he wrote. “Republicans must stick together and UNIFY to get this done, and to keep America safe — something which the Democrats don’t care about. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

‘Glaring contrast’ to be highlighted

Democrats said during their press conference they plan to use the marathon amendment voting session on the budget resolution that sets up the reconciliation process to force Republicans to take votes on several issues. 

“We are ready with our amendments to show the glaring contrast between the parties in terms of who’s for reducing your costs and who’s not,” Schumer said. 

Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., said that instead of working on legislation to bring down costs for everyday Americans, Republicans in Congress are focused on providing tens of billions in additional funding for immigration enforcement. 

“Gas prices have surged. Health care premiums have doubled or tripled, or worse, pricing millions out of their coverage. So what are Republicans doing about all of that? Nothing,” she said. “Their urgent top priority this week is shoveling at least $70 billion at ICE and Border Patrol with zero accountability, zero reforms and zero strings attached.”

Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said Republicans are sending a clear message about their policy goals and priorities by using the reconciliation process to provide the administration with another significant boost for immigration and deportation activities. 

“When you’re in the majority in the Senate, you get limited opportunities to use this unusual tool of reconciliation — once, maybe twice, in a year,” he said. “And so it’s pretty significant that using this tool, they have decided to do exactly nothing about the cost of living.”

Klobuchar decries $70 billion for immigration enforcement

Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said that $70 billion in federal spending could go toward addressing many of the other challenges facing the country. 

Instead of giving it to ICE and the Border Patrol, she said, Congress could bolster the number of local police officers, or help people afford the cost of their health insurance premiums, or have Medicare cover dental and vision and hearing care, or build hundreds of thousands of new homes, or help lower the cost of child care for millions. 

Republicans, she said, also know there is a need to place limits on federal immigration agents after events like those in her home state and throughout the country. 

“They know there are serious problems. Why? A number of them joined with us at that Judiciary hearing to call for Kristi Noem to leave,” Klobuchar said, referring to the early March hearing that took place just days before the former DHS secretary was removed. “They asked just as tough questions, some of them, as we did.”