> They put forward the legislation.
Not “they”, he. Santorum’s bill had zero cosponsors. You are misrepresenting the policy proposal of a single GOP Senator as something that GOP Senate Caucus as a whole supported.
> That bill is still there, waiting to be called up. There hasn't been a vote either way on it.
That bill is almost 20 years old now, and Santorum is no longer a Senator. The bill is expired, no longer under consideration-they can’t call a vote on it.
If a Senator wanted to pursue this, they’d have to introduce a brand new bill in their own name. Sure, they could copy and paste the exact same text if they wanted, just change the 2005 to 2025 [0]. But officially, the Senate would consider it a new and separate bill, with a different bill number
But I’d be surprised if any of them will - Santorum’s bill was very unpopular with his colleagues, he couldn’t convince any of them to cosponsor it. I don’t think anything has changed
> And even if it is supposedly all talk, why would you vote for the guy who's talking about hurting you all the time? Hey this guy's been swinging a knife at me for a while now. He's probably not going to stab me though; I'll ask him to hang around.
I’m not an American so I’m not voting either way on this. But I have American friends/colleagues, who’ve expressed positive enough opinions of Trump, some of them may actually vote for him. (Not that their vote really counts, since I don’t believe any of them lives in a “swing state”.) And I can understand some of their logic. Trump has never said anything about abolishing the National Weather Service, he’s said he hasn’t even read Project 2025 and people believe him (you don’t need to be a Trump supporter to do so-does Trump have the attention span to read 900+ pages of thinktank blather?) Most Americans deciding whether or not to vote for him are thinking about other issues than this one.
[0] Actually probably not - they’d need to get the drafting lawyers to review it because 20 years of subsequent legislation may have introduced changes to the laws being amended, requiring updates to Santorum’s bill text to resolve conflicts - the legal equivalent of rebasing your Git branch