President Donald Trump was due for lunch with Senate Republicans on Wednesday to celebrate signing a big new affordable housing package, and maybe spend some time reveling in primary wins by some new leftist boogeymen in New York.
He instead signed nothing, got in a screaming match with one senator and berated two others, livid over a vote limiting his power over the war in Iran and his party’s inability to get his elections bill passed.
“It would be fair to say that he was very upset about the war powers vote,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) said after the closed-door lunch.
Senators emerging from the meeting said the hourlong conversation with the president was “passionate,” particularly after he called out four Republicans who voted Tuesday to have Trump seek congressional approval for further military action in Iran. He also demanded Republicans pass the voter ID bill known as the SAVE America Act — despite it lacking enough support.
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Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), a physician, told reporters afterward the session resembled “a hospital board meeting when a bunch of doctors are yelling at each other.”
“At the end of the day, we’ll figure out a way to get along,” he said.
The bickering came shortly after Trump canceled a planned signing of a bipartisan housing bill that passed both chambers of Congress this week and was backed by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). Many Republicans were eager to tout the bill as a sign they are addressing the cost of living, a major concern for voters.
Trump canceled the signing over his frustrations about the war powers vote and the stalled SAVE America Act.
Much of the drama in the room revolved around the Senate’s recent rebuke of the war in Iran. Trump and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) had a heated exchange about the war, Trump berated Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pennsylvania) for missing the vote and he called out Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) for backing the resolution when she entered the room, a source familiar with Trump’s comments told NOTUS.
Cassidy, who also voted for the resolution, told reporters that Trump raised his voice after Cassidy requested a briefing from the White House on negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. He said he makes “no apologies for standing up to the president.”
“I lost my temper, that’s inappropriate,” said Cassidy, who lost his primary this spring after Trump endorsed his opponent. “But I again matched his tone and his volume, and it went back and forth. … The American people need to know more than we are being told. The Senate needs to know, and it does not appear, that the course of this [war] is going the way that we were told.”
Kennedy told reporters that Trump was concerned about the effect of the nonbinding resolution — which has now passed both chambers of Congress — on ongoing negotiations between U.S. and Iranian officials.
“It would be fair to say that he was very upset about the war powers vote,” Kennedy said. “He was in the middle of pretty heavy-duty negotiations, and he had to stop and explain to the Iranian negotiators why it was a meaningless vote and that totally upset him.”
Thune told reporters that Senate Republicans also had a “robust conversation” with Trump about the SAVE America Act and the president’s preferred pathway to advance it.
“We’ve made the point a number of times that we don’t have the votes, but that’s not a conclusion obviously he would like to see us draw,” Thune said.
But multiple senators who attended the lunch meeting told reporters that Republicans did not push back on Trump’s calls to pass the legislation through the Senate.
“We’ve made it clear multiple times that if the SAVE Act requires the filibuster, it’s simply not going to happen — that’s been obvious long before today,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said when asked if senators conveyed that message to Trump at the meeting.
Several senators said Trump did not discuss how to move forward on the housing bill passed by Congress this week. It remains in legislative limbo, as it has yet to be sent to the White House.
Trump later Wednesday reiterated that he does not plan to sign the housing bill until the SAVE America Act’s direction becomes clearer, and added that he has problems with the legislation itself.
“I made billions of dollars with housing,” Trump told reporters. “I know housing better than anybody maybe anywhere. It’s all about the interest rate. Lower the interest rates, you can have all the housing you want. I don’t want to hurt people that own houses, too.”
Johnson will meet with Trump at the White House on Thursday morning to discuss the SAVE America Act and try to help reduce tensions between the White House and GOP senators.
Johnson told NOTUS that he intends to present Trump with a plan to pass the bill through the Senate with a simple majority using the budget reconciliation process. Any bill would have to pass muster by the Senate parliamentarian and could lose only three Republican votes in the upper chamber.
“A new equation to solve every day, it’s just the story of my life,” Johnson said. “The key is, how do you get that through the Senate. We have an idea on how to do that using reconciliation, and so I’m gonna go lay that out to him in detail, and we’ll talk about the merits of the bills that are still pending.”
The back-and-forth is only the latest sign of intraparty tensions. In recent weeks, Trump blocked the renewal of a crucial spy powers tool backed by leadership, delayed a vote on immigration and customs enforcement funding with his proposed “anti-weaponization” fund, and endorsed against Cassidy and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
“Lots of unity, lots of Republican love,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said as he emerged from the lunch meeting. Paul smiled when asked if he was being sarcastic, adding, “Me, being sarcastic?”
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