By
Ed Kilgore,
political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015
Why should Jon Cornyn go out of his way to help the president who ended his career?
Ninety-five days from the midterm elections, Donald Trump is struggling with Congress over his agenda. Not so much with Democrats, who have very limited ways of obstructing him, and not so much with House Republicans, who have so far cleared every bit of legislation he cares about. It’s Senate Republicans who are causing him fits at the very moment the GOP should be transforming itself into a lean, mean fighting machine for November. Indeed, Trump’s most insistent demand at the moment is that “his” Senate Majority Leader John Thune cancel its crucial (from an electoral point of view) August recess to agitate the air over the SAVE America Act, for which there is not even majority support in the Senate, much less the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Democratic filibuster. There are even fewer votes to satisfy Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans just kill the filibuster outright, exposing them to the wrath of a future Democratic majority. And at the moment, it’s not clear there is a majority for the House-passed budget resolution Trump wants that would set up big, controversial votes on funding his Iran War and creating a slush fund to encourage states to adopt elements of the SAVE America Act.
