When Senate Republicans slink back to Washington next week, they will return to an agenda that President Donald Trump has insisted on complicating. Before Memorial Day weekend, lawmakers abandoned a vote on immigration enforcement funding rather than vote on his latest demands. In the interim, another veteran senator lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger — and in the process became part of a growing contingent of legislators with little reason to bow to the president’s absurd demands.
What will be less feasible for the Senate is ramming through the items that are of interest only to the president.
Tuesday saw Sen. John Cornyn of Texas lose his re-election bid to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, despite the four-term senator’s embarrassing efforts to court the president’s endorsement. His defeat follows that of Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted to convict Trump during the 2021 impeachment trial. (Cornyn’s sin, in Trump’s eyes, was merely insufficient adulation.) Now Cassidy and Cornyn both still have six months left in their terms.
Republicans hold a 53-seat majority in the Senate, which means Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., can only lose the support of four GOP senators. (In case of a tie vote, Vice President JD Vance can break the deadlock.) That cushion is big enough for most issues that fit within the MAGA and GOP agendas — as much as there’s any daylight between the two.
What will be less feasible for the Senate is ramming through the items that are of interest only to the president. While congressional Republicans focused on keeping their majority are focused on affordability, the White House has obliquely acknowledged that there’s no keeping the president on the same track. As MS NOW’s Jake Traylor and Soorin Kim recently reported, he would rather focus on matters like construction projects around Washington and providing payouts to loyalists investigated by the Justice Department during previous administrations.
Some of Trump’s misguided priorities require explicit congressional approval, like his obsession with building a White House ballroom. Others likely require lawmakers to simply be willing to stand aside as he abuses his authority, as with the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund his Justice Department is pursuing. Neither feels like much of a possibility given the number of frenemies the president has racked up in the Senate lately.
We saw as much after Cassidy lost, when he flipped to support Democrats on a key War Powers Act vote to rein in the Iran war. Beyond Cassidy and Cornyn, there are at least five other Republicans poised to oppose the White House’s most Trump-centric pressures: Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Tillis is retiring after his term ends in January and has increasingly spoken out against Trump’s overreaches, including the slush fund. McConnell, a former GOP caucus leader with no real love for Trump, has come out against the fund as well. Collins has already made it through her primary and will be more worried about fending off Democratic challenger Graham Platner than keeping in Trump’s good graces. Murkowski already knows she’s on Trump’s list and has been for ages, but despite his best efforts, he still hasn’t been able to knock her from her seat. And Rand Paul is Rand Paul, a libertarian gadfly who will happily vote against any spending he sees as unnecessary.
The power senators wield during their six-year terms has made much more savvy presidents hustle hard to maintain good relationships with the upper chamber.
It would be too much at this point to call this group of senators “anti-Trump” — their collective criticism has so far been relatively muted, hyperspecific or both. None has called for Trump to step down or otherwise challenged the foundations of his rule this term. There’s also enough diversity in their stances that there’s little evidence they’ll vote as a unified bloc. But there are enough of them now to make vote counting more of a hassle for Thune than it would have been if not for Trump’s disregard for his supposed allies.
Even individual senators can make life harder for the White House. Tillis successfully pressured the Justice Department to drop its sham investigation into former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell by promising to block his replacement’s confirmation. Any one of them could likewise place a hold on nominees Trump puts forward to restock a rapidly thinning Cabinet. And with budget reconciliation being the only game in town to approve new funding while avoiding a Democratic filibuster, keeping as many GOP members on board as possible also means there are more potential points of failure.
The power senators wield during their six-year terms has made much more savvy presidents hustle hard to maintain good relationships with the upper chamber. Instead, Trump has decided to throw caution to the wind and hope for the best. But the math doesn’t seem to be in his favor as we hit the final six months of this congress, leaving him with fewer options to get to 50 votes.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.