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BY PHILIP ELLIOTT
Senior Correspondent, TIME |
There’s an inherent tension between any President and the Senate Majority Leader. George W. Bush and his team did everything they could in 2004 to make Tom Daschle the first party leader in the Senate to lose re-election since 1952. Barack Obama, who hired Daschle’s top aide as his own when he won a seat in the the Senate that same year, had a respectful but strained relationship with Harry Reid, who praised him as a "light-skinned African-American" with "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Donald Trump insulted Mitch McConnell as “Old Crow.” And Chuck Schumer drove out to Joe Biden’s beach house in Delaware after a calamitous debate performance against Trump to tell his former Senate colleague that he had to end his re-election bid for the good of the party. |
Trump’s dynamic with his current counterpart John Thune is now rapidly climbing that pressure scale. |
“That’s too bad for him and too bad for the Republican Party. He’s got the votes. He should get it done,” Trump told reporters of Thune in the Oval Office on Wednesday when asked about a restrictive voting measure that is, at least for now, D.O.A. in the upper chamber. |
It was mild ding by Trump’s standards, for sure. But it speaks to the frayed relationship between the two Republicans, who are in a standoff over Trump’s latest fixation, a bill that would remake how Americans vote. Thune has been clear that the proposed legislation, which has cleared the House, lacks the votes it needs in the Senate and there is no appetite for changing the rules to ease its passage. Put plainly: Thune knows the headcount and isn’t wasting the time on something that is doomed, and Trump does not much care for that. |
"If I thought there was a path to getting a result, I'm all for it," Thune told reporters this week. |
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The Senate is racing toward an August recess with a packed to-do list that seems doable: a sanctions bill targeting Russia, a stopgap funding measure to keep the government open through Election Day, movement on a catch-all reconciliation bill, and a bunch of nominees, including one that on Wednesday seemed to inch closer to giving Trump an up-or-down on his imperiled pick for Attorney General. But Trump says the upper chamber should not leave town until it gives him the SAVE America Act, his voting bill. He also wants the Senate to change its threshold for moving most legislation from 60 votes to 51 votes, ending the delay machine of the filibuster. |
“John Thune should not allow the United States Senate to ‘leave town’ until it passes The Save America Act or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER, where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of, including a full and deep throated SAVE AMERICA ACT, the Budget, and the ever looming Debt Ceiling disaster, 1929!” the President wrote on his social media platform. “The Dumocrats will do it on day one, and can’t believe how lucky they got with this Senate leadership.” |
In response to which Thune had a polite brush-off. |
“If the endgame is, we actually get an outcome or result, we could stay here until Christmas,” Thune said. “But Democrats aren’t voting for this, I’m just telling you. And the Republicans are not getting rid of the legislative filibuster.” |
The situation has left nerves raw at the Capitol, with the typically staid Thune showing signs of frustration. "Show me how this ends. What's the picture of victory at the end?" Thune said. |
The White House has already summoned close to two dozen Republican Senators to pressure them directly to end the filibuster. According to a senior Republican aide on the Hill, 15 of the 20 who took the meetings told the White House staff directly that they were a hard no on the shift when it comes to the sacrosanct tool of obstruction. |
“This is not an open question. It’s just a fact, and the facts don’t change,” Thune said. |
That doesn’t mean the White House accepts it. Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt ominously told reporters that Trump’s “patience is running out” when it comes to the Senate passing the SAVE America Act. |
But that fuse has flames racing from both ends. |
Unlike House Speaker Mike Johnson, the GOP in the Senate is largely of the same mind that Trumpism will ultimately be only an era. Also, unlike the election to pick the chief of the House, Senate leadership elections are conducted by private ballot, so there’s less risk of running afoul of Trump’s whims. And added to that, Senators are elected to six-year terms, meaning they have a little more padding against any one vote. |
It’s also just bad politics in an environment primed to give Democrats the Senate majority if the GOP base stays home. “Disappointing [the President] but also our voters 99 days before the election strikes me as a bad idea,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who once was a contender for Thune’s role and lost his primary this year to a Trump-backed candidate. |
As a result, Senate Republicans are more hardened against Trump’s pressure than their House colleagues—and the understood reality is that Thune himself is nowhere near risk, even as the current storm between the Senate Majority leader and the President builds. |
Cornyn was blunt in his assessment of the situation: the Senate “can stay here ‘til the cows come home, and it’s not going to change anything.” |
The conservative Senate Republican Conference has been circulating a memo to members telling them that staying in Washington for August would make sense if it could move the needle—but it won’t. |
“I don’t think staying in session will make more votes appear. … And we have work to do at home to make sure that we beat the Democrats in November,” the memo advises lawmakers to say. |
That said, Trump has gotten some lawmakers on side in publicly backing his desire for the upper chamber to spend a sticky August casting votes for legislation that would likely not make much of a difference in this year’s midterms in any case. They include Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody of Florida, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Jim Banks of Indiana, Darlene Graham of South Carolina and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee—all red-state Republicans whose seats are generally seen as safe holds. |
But even if the Senate were to stay in town, the math is not mathing. “We simply don’t have the votes,” Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said. |
That doesn’t mean Trump will stop pushing for them. |
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