White House eyes hardball tactics against GOP skeptics to advance anti-voting bill
After months of rhetoric about how he doesn’t really want or need Congress to do much of anything for the remainder of his presidency, Donald Trump has shifted gears in recent months, insisting that lawmakers approve an anti-voting bill he’s labeled the SAVE America Act.
His efforts, however, aren’t going especially well.
Part of the problem is that the Senate’s filibuster rule still exists, and as a procedural matter, there doesn’t appear to be any alternative way to pass the proposal. (Relatedly, there’s simply no way the package could garner 60 votes). To make matters worse, even if the Republican majority were to follow the president’s instructions and scrap the filibuster altogether, the anti-voting legislation doesn’t even appear to have the support of 50 senators.
In fact, earlier this month, when White House allies tried to add Trump’s bill to a funding package, four Senate Republicans — Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — voted against it.
At that point, the president and his team started exploring a different kind of question: How could they apply leverage to this quartet?
An answer has proved elusive. The president and his political operation can’t go after Collins, because they need her to win in the fall to reduce the odds of Democrats claiming a Senate majority. Trump has tried to bully Murkowski with increasingly caustic harangues, but the Alaskan isn’t up for re-election until 2028, and she’s already proven an ability to persevere without the backing of Trump or the party.
That leaves Tillis and McConnell, both of whom are retiring this year, which has freed them to do as they please and left the White House with little in the way of leverage.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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