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President Donald Trump’s meeting with Senate Republicans might have been meant to find a way to pass voter ID and citizenship verification legislation, but it devolved into a tense shouting match over the war in Iran.
Tensions among Senate Republicans were already simmering with Trump over his last-minute decision to nuke the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, a bipartisan housing package filled with his priorities that the GOP viewed as an easy win to sell to voters in the upcoming midterm elections.
Trump described the closed-door affair in a positive light afterward.
“I think we had a really great meeting, and we’re very proud of the party,” he said. “We like our leader. We like everybody, really, in the room. I don’t like a few people, but that’s okay. I think you know who they are.”
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What started as a push to pass Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act transformed into Trump railing against Republicans for allowing a war powers resolution handcuffing his authorities in Iran to pass on Tuesday.
And that spurred a confrontation with Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who Trump campaigned against and defeated earlier this year.
“He asked, ‘why would anybody vote for the War Powers Act?’,” Cassidy said afterward. “As he continued, I said, ‘is that a rhetorical question, or would you like to really know?’ He said, ‘I’d like to know.’”
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“I stood and said, ‘you have not told the American people what’s going on. It was supposed to last four weeks, it’s lasted four months,’” he continued. “‘Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on.’”
Then began the shouting match, which Cassidy blamed on the “Irish in me,” until ultimately he was asked to sit down by his colleagues.
“I guess my point is, though, that the American people need to know more than we are being told,” Cassidy said. “The Senate needs to know, and it does not appear, although I don’t know for sure, that the course of this is going the way that we were told.”
Lawmakers have still not been fully briefed on the memorandum of understanding Trump and Iranian leaders signed last week, and have raised several issues with its contents and whether it will actually meet the end goals the administration set out to achieve at the start of the war months ago.
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A source familiar with the meeting said that Trump was “very animated” over the war powers vote because it hurt the administration’s negotiating position with Iran, and that he “named names” of the Republicans who voted with Democrats, including Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., who was absent from the vote because he was with the president at an event in Pennsylvania.
The source described the shouting match as a “7 out of 10.”
“You know, [like] two boys on recess that are yelling at each other over a foul on a basketball court,” they said.
Meanwhile, the meeting came just hours after Trump blew up a ceremony to sign the 21st Century Road to Housing Act into law on his quest to force Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act.
Lawmakers leaving the meeting said the housing package didn’t come up, and neither did a solution to finding a path forward on passing the SAVE America Act. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has told Trump several times that Republicans don’t have the votes to pass it.
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Thune said after the meeting that Trump’s discussion on the SAVE America Act was focused on “the priority he places on it, and how the pathway he thinks there is to get an outcome or result.”
“So, it really wasn’t on that particular issue, much of a back and forth,” Thune said.
And lawmakers didn’t push back on Trump’s desire to pass the legislation, either, despite the political reality that Democrats are blocking the bill and there is no unified front from Republicans to nuke the filibuster to ram it through.
“It was more the president saying, ‘If we don’t do this, we’re gonna get ourselves in real trouble going down the road,’” Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., said. “And basically, that was more of the tone than it was, you know, ‘what do y’all think about this? Is this gonna pass? It’s not gonna pass.’”
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