President Donald Trump is intent on forcing an August breakthrough on his No. 1 Capitol Hill priority. John Thune has the unenviable task of trying to bring him back to reality.
Fixated on the GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act, Trump is ramping up pressure on the Senate majority leader and fellow GOP senators. He’s now going after one of Congress’ most sacrosanct elements of the congressional calendar — the August recess — to try to force Republicans’ hands.
But Trump’s demand to keep lawmakers in town, delivered in a Monday morning Truth Social post, immediately won a skeptical reception from Thune and other senators who argued that holding senators hostage in Washington wouldn’t actually deliver what Trump wants. Neither the elections bill nor his bid to end the 60-vote legislative filibuster to pass it can succeed, they said, despite the president’s frequent verbal sledgehammering.
“If I thought there was a path to getting a result, I’m all for it. … But I’m still, show me how this ends,” Thune told reporters Monday about Trump’s recess cancellation demand. “If we are going to be sitting here and in endless quorum calls, I don’t know if that’s in anybody’s best interest.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger earlier this year, argued the effect could be worse than simply wasting time — that it could backfire politically with only a few months before the midterms.
“Disappointing [Trump] but also our voters 99 days before the election strikes me as a bad idea,” Cornyn said. “If you promise [voters] the sun and the moon and the aurora borealis, then you can’t accomplish it, then they’re going to be disappointed and they’re going to be more focused on us than they are Democrats.”
The issue for Trump, conservative activists and their Hill allies is that there is a quiet majority of Senate Republicans who back the SAVE America Act but also oppose eliminating the filibuster and don’t want to invite a deluge of criticism from the party base by advertising their position.
Enough Senate Republicans voted to debate the elections bill earlier this year only after leaders privately offered reassurances that it wouldn’t turn into an attempt to undo the 60-vote threshold.
Republicans are expected to discuss Trump’s push to stay in session during closed-door meetings this week, as well as his separate demand that they adopt a budget blueprint before they leave town for a $95 billion party-line spending bill that would include some election-related spending.
Party leaders are eager to get their members back home, where they can spend time on the campaign trail, where the GOP is not only facing the usual midterm headwinds for the president’s party but also muddled messaging from the White House.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), a member of GOP leadership, predicted that it would be an “interesting” week.
Asked if she thought the math would change if the Senate stayed in town, Capito said, “I can’t predict that.”
But there’s no sign yet that either Trump or his closest allies on Capitol Hill are ready to accept that reality. Instead, they could force the Senate to hold a vote on whether or not to stay in session, which could give the party’s disgruntled base fresh ammunition to use against members of the party just months before Election Day.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said over the weekend he opposed leaving for the break, and a slew of conservative colleagues have since piled on.
“I stand ready to stay in Washington through the August recess — as long as it takes — to get the SAVE America Act passed,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) posted on X.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) added that “now is the time to dig in, eliminate the manufactured filibuster, and start a new Senate tradition of actually getting things done for the Constitution and the American people.”
The SAVE America fight has weighed even more directly on Thune as pressure builds on him personally.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last week that “patience is running out” with the Senate GOP leader. The president also urged supporters during a rally last week to call Thune directly to tell him to pass the elections bill as he revived his call to nix the filibuster.
Thune pushed back Monday, saying the Trump administration has known for months that there aren’t the votes to get rid of the 60-vote hurdle. White House officials, he said, met with about 20 GOP senators earlier this year to discuss the issue. Fifteen of the 20, he estimated, opposed moving to simple-majority passage akin to the House.
“This is not an open question,” Thune said. “It’s just a fact. And the facts don’t change. Now, if he can change the facts and start moving some of those senators who are ‘nos’ into ‘yeses’ then we have a different conversation. But that’s just the reality.”
Staff for the Senate Republican Conference, which is chaired by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), circulated internal talking points to Republican offices Monday that were obtained by POLITICO. They encouraged senators to emphasize that they would support staying into the August recess if it would change the outcome, 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 reads.
Underscoring how Trump’s tiff is threatening to overshadow the GOP’s legislative agenda ahead of the recess, the guidance also encouraged Republican senators to “reject the false choice between the President and Senate leaders: express support for both.”
It also recommended GOP senators say that Trump and Thune “are united and doing an excellent job delivering safety and prosperity for Americans, despite unprecedented Democrat obstruction.”
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