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Trump's trip to US Capitol to spotlight warring divisions in GOP

Steven T. Dennis, Erik Wasson and Aidan Williams, Bloomberg News on

Published in Political News

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump plans to spend a Wednesday excursion to the U.S. Capitol demanding divisive voter ID legislation. Frustrated Republican senators have other ideas.

Over lunch in a wood-paneled room on the Capitol’s second floor, several GOP senators plan to try to impress on Trump that his targeting of fellow Republicans, controversial diversions and refusal to focus on voters’ economic concerns threaten the party’s control of Congress.

“We’re not on the same page now, and I think that’s dangerous,” Texas Republican John Cornyn, whose long Senate career Trump effectively ended last month when he endorsed Cornyn’s GOP rival, said Tuesday.

The Wednesday lunch, Trump’s first trip to the Capitol in months, will pit two GOP factions — hard-liners firmly aligned with Trump and more traditional Republicans concerned about the president’s combative tactics — against each other in a high-stakes clash less than five months before the midterm elections.

The very invitation for the lunch underscores the simmering tensions within the party. Florida Republican Rick Scott, a Republican hard-liner, reached out to Trump directly and only later told Majority Leader John Thune about it, a breach in Senate protocol.

Scott and Utah Republican Mike Lee have urged Thune to focus on passing the president’s “Save America” bill, which would require voters to have photo IDs and proof of citizenship, among other provisions.

“My goal is to bring people together to get something done,” Scott told reporters on Tuesday. Trump, he added, is “the best chance we have of getting something accomplished.”

Others, however, see the voter ID legislation as a time-intensive endeavor popular mostly with Trump’s hard-core base. It risks turning off independent voters and tying up potentially months of floor time on something that can’t get the 60 votes required for Senate passage due to the chamber’s filibuster rule.

“It’s unproductive and has no chance of getting passed,” retiring Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told reporters. “Generally speaking, I try to stay away from those endeavors.”

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska invoked her home state’s pastime of dog-sled racing to warn against the party working at cross-purposes heading into an election.

“You ever been on a dog team?” Murkowski said. “You can have as many as 14 dogs, but if everybody’s not pulling together, sled goes crazy.”

 

Mike Rounds of South Dakota said he expects Trump will lobby the Senate on the bill during Wednesday’s lunch “but we can count, and arithmetic really does matter in the Senate.”

Indeed, Trump has publicly urged the Senate to do away with the filibuster entirely, a move Thune and other leaders oppose.

“Anybody who doesn’t want to Terminate the Filibuster is a FOOL, a very stupid one, at that!” Trump posted on social media last week.

An April poll by Politico found that only 37% of Americans said they support the SAVE America bill when asked about it by name, while 21% opposed it and 42% were undecided or unsure.

Several senators stressed that they would rather address affordability, the biggest issue for voters ahead of the midterms.That includes touting Trump’s tax cuts, as well as new efforts to address rising prices like the bipartisan housing package that passed the chamber on Monday.

Several, including Thune, dismissed Lee’s assertion that Republicans should tie up the floor until Democrats make an error that essentially lifts the 60-vote requirement.

“It’s never worked before,” Thune said. “Sometimes when something hasn’t been done in 100 years, there’s a reason for that.”

_____

(With assistance from Caitlin Reilly.)


©2026 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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