By David Morgan
WASHINGTON, June 24 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump arrived at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday in an unusual visit to lobby his fellow Republicans into passing a long-stalled package of national voting restrictions that has aggravated party fissures and shown the limits of his power.
He headed into a closed-door lunch with Senate Republicans after confounding many of them by abruptly canceling his plan to sign a bipartisan affordable housing bill just beforehand in an effort to ratchet up pressure to enact the SAVE America Act, his top legislative priority. The act would require a photo ID to vote in federal elections and proof of U.S. citizenship to register, while compelling states to turn over their voter registration rolls to the federal government.
“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” Trump wrote in a social media post, shortly before the lunch.
Some lawmakers indicated the delayed signing of the housing bill may be a largely symbolic gesture: it can become law anyway if the president has not signed within 10 days, and lawmakers believe they have enough votes to overcome a presidential veto.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat who helped negotiate the housing bill with Republicans, noted it passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan majorities at a time when soaring living expenses are a major concern for voters.
“But at the 11th hour, Donald Trump is refusing to sign it into law,” Warren wrote in a social media post after Trump attacked her with a racial slur in his cancellation message. “His policies have made your costs go up — and he doesn’t care.”
Asked whether Trump’s actions are becoming destructive for himself and the Republican Party as it tries to persuade voters they are working to address the cost of living, Senator John Cornyn told reporters before the lunch: “Those are questions you have to ask him. They are sort of inexplicable to me. I don’t know if there’s a precedent for it.”
‘HARD REALITIES’
Trump’s desire to force through a voter ID bill may not be enough. Although Republicans control 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats, they lack the 60 votes needed to meet the chamber’s filibuster threshold for most bills, which accounts for five failed votes on the measure or its provisions since mid-March.
Republicans say they also do not have enough votes to meet Trump’s repeated demands to eliminate the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act with a simple majority.
“Those are just hard realities. And I think people at some point have to come to grips with that,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters ahead of Trump’s visit.
Senate Republicans have also rejected Trump’s call for other hardball tactics, such as attaching the SAVE America Act to must-pass legislation or firing a Senate official who blocked it from a recent spending package.
Backers of the bill say they should not abandon efforts to pass a top Trump priority.
“For every bill up here, when it starts, there’s not enough votes,” said Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida, a supporter of the legislation who invited Trump to Wednesday’s meeting. “We’re going to have a nice conversation to see if we can figure out how to get this across the finish line.”
RARE VISIT
Presidential visits to Congress are rare, and Wednesday’s meeting comes at a time when relations between Trump and his party in the Senate are at a low ebb.
With less than five months until November midterm elections that threaten to end their majority, Senate Republicans have begun to resist Trump on several fronts: They forced him to abandon a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, and expressed outrage over his pick of an ally with no intelligence background as the top U.S. intelligence official.
And on Tuesday, Republican Senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy joined Democrats to pass legislation to halt U.S. military action against Iran.
That drew a sharp rebuke from Trump on social media: “Four Republican Losers voted with the Dumocrats, and Iran asked my people, ‘what does that all mean?’ These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or another, because I always get it done!” the president said in a post.
Critics of the voting legislation, including Senate Democrats, say the bill targets a nearly non-existent problem of non-citizen voting, but would disenfranchise American citizens who do not have ready access to a passport or birth certificate.
(Reporting by David Morgan; additional reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Scott Malone, Andy Sullivan, Edmund Klamann and Chizu Nomiyama)
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