By David Morgan
WASHINGTON, June 24 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump implored Republican lawmakers during a rare visit to the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday to pass a package of national voting restrictions that has aggravated party fissures and shown the limits of his power.
Trump told reporters he had “a really great meeting” with Republican senators over lunch, hours after confounding many of them by abruptly canceling his plan to sign a bipartisan affordable housing bill into law to pressure them 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 canceled signing of the housing bill may be a largely symbolic gesture, if an exasperating one as Republicans sought to persuade voters ahead of November’s midterm elections that the party was focused on tamping down soaring living expenses. The housing bill can become law anyway if the president has not signed within 10 days.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a New York Democrat who helped negotiate the housing bill with Republicans, noted it passed both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan majorities at a time when voters are worried about affordability.
“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.”
Trump has repeatedly dismissed concerns about the high cost of living, telling reporters at the White House earlier this month “I love the inflation” when asked about rising gas prices caused by the Iran war. Gas prices have eased below $4 per gallon nationwide since Washington and Tehran reached a ceasefire but remain substantially higher than they were before the war.
‘INEXPLICABLE’
Asked whether Trump’s actions are becoming destructive for himself and the Republican Party as it tries to retain control of Congress, Senator John Cornyn of Texas 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.”
As he headed into the lunch, Trump was asked by a reporter if his election legislation was more important to him than resolving the national housing crisis. He declined to say, instead offering commentary on Tuesday’s primary elections in New York.
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.
“Those are just hard realities. And I think people at some point have to come to grips with that,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, of South Dakota, 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.”
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.”
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; Writing by David Morgan and Jonathan Allen; Editing by Scott Malone, Andy Sullivan, Edmund Klamann and Alistair Bell)
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